Rate limits for downloading follower lists

[puneetschdv]

Hi,

I am an academic researcher and there is so much ongoing research about analyzing networks of connected users. I created my Twitter developer account to get follower lists of a set of social media influencers but it seems that my data-gathering exercise will take a few months because of rate limits. I have a list of 2000 influencers and each one has millions of followers.

Seems like getting tweets have much higher rate limits and that would be lots of data. Getting follower ids (to analyze overlap between follower sets) seems like a much shorter request in terms of MBs of data but the rate limits are more strict for this.

Would it be an acceptable request to ask for higher rate limits for downloading followers' data?

Thanks so much for reading.

Best Regards