Recently Twitter announced its latest push to earn money for the company, which was to remove free access to its API, which is impacting a whole host of bots on the platform. However, Elon Musk has since gone to Twitter to say that free access to the API will still be available, but there’s a catch.
Responding to feedback, Twitter will enable a light, write-only API for bots providing good content that is free
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2023
It’s not clear what ‘good content’ is defined as at the moment, however Musk clarified when the free tier was removed that it is currently being abused and not adding value to the platform.
Yeah, free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators. There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things.
Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2023
The fact that the new version of the free tier will only be write-only means that those who utilised the API for educational research, development and study will have to pay for the ability to access areas of the API they previously could get to for no cost.
