Last week, Twitter said it will close free access to its APIs starting February 9. Now, days before the deadline, Elon Musk said that after receiving feedback from developers, Twitter will provide a write-only API for “bots that serve up good content that’s free.”
This decision is as opaque as some of the other policy decisions under Musk. There is no information on what constitutes “good content” and who will decide it. However, if Twitter ends up implementing this rule, some bots will get a new lifeline on the social network.
Previously, Twitter closed API access to third-party clients saying they broke a “long-standing rule” without any specification. The company then quietly updated its developer terms to reflect that the app may not “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar product or service to the Twitter Applications.”
Following the announcement, many developers who made fun of bots criticized the decision saying that their automation provided free content to people and in turn improved services. Last week, Buzzfeed interviewed various bot developers they were not happy with the decision. These include @_restaurant_bot who tweets random photos of restaurants and @_weather_bot_who tweets pictures of different places with weather updates.
At the moment, it is not clear if you count as @BigTechAlertwho tweet about big tech executives and organizations following and unfollowing each other, will be eligible for this free tier, as they may need to scan account information.
Darius Kazemi, a developer who has made over 80 robots and even hosted a bot developer summit in 2016, told TechCrunch during a call that these automated accounts have been an integral part of Twitter for years. He said that some of these bots with thousands of followers bring joy to many people on a daily basis.
He mentioned that it would be expensive to maintain these bots that are providing free content to the platform.
“I have more than 80 bots on Twitter so it would cost me several thousand dollars to keep them every year and I can’t afford that kind of money,” he said.
Musk has been trying to generate more revenue for Twitter with moves like an expensive new subscription plan and increasing advertising dollars. He also plans to show ads in the responses to share the revenue with the creators. While details on how this will work are scant, the CEO of Twitter said that only Blue subscribers can earn this money. Therefore, content bots may not earn money even if ads are shown on your accounts or in replies under your tweets.
The Twitter free API outage isn’t just affecting bot developers. There are tons of student developers and hate speech or disinformation researchers who might not have the budget to pay a monthly fee. Twitter API v2 had special access for academics, but that might not be the case under the new API rules.
The developers have also pointed outside that many bots that spread spam do not use the official API. Therefore, the company’s intention to shut down the free API to eliminate spam might not work well.
