Twitter has gotten a lot of bad press in the last couple of years. I have a few friends and family members who just won't go near it because of trolling and general nastiness that can swamp certain topics. That's unfortunate because Twitter can be genuinely useful as a research tool, as this article points out. (I have noticed that the overall quality of my feed has improved dramatically since Twitter banned 45* and many of his more rabid followers).
I keep my Twitter feed fairly clean by following a limited number of people. I've heard of people following more than a thousand people, but I've limited my followers list to just over a hundred. Most are authors, journalists, and scientists.
But there are other things that you can do to mine information on Twitter, other than keeping a curated followers list. For example, you can search on hashtags and search a specific date range (which I did not know you could do until reading the article). You can also turn on notifications for specific accounts.
One thing that the article doesn't describe, that can be extremely useful for research, is to create or follow lists. For example, if you want to get news about COVID-19 that is free of disinformation, you can follow lists of scientists and medical researchers like this one created by journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.
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