As part of Elon Musk’s latest attempts to turn a de facto online public square into a profitable enterprise (and rid the site of spam), Twitter announced earlier this month that it will be removing free API access for developers. The move has inspired near-unanimous outrage and disappointment from researchers, developers and journalists who rely on API tools to carry out their work.
“Nobody really knows a lot about what’s going on,” said Carlos Hernández- Echevarría, head of public policy at Maldita, a large independent fact-checking organization in Spain. “What we have is an announcement from Twitter that is denying API access that used to be free up until now, adding a paywall.”
