Twitter had originally planned to introduce the changes last week, but delayed it until Monday. On Monday, the company tweeted that it was delaying the launch again "by a few more days,” without providing more details.
The API paywall is Musk’s latest attempt to squeeze revenue out of Twitter, which is on the hook for about $1 billion in yearly interest payments from the billionaire’s acquisition, completed in October.
It’s not just disaster relief groups that are concerned. Academic and nongovernmental researchers for years have used Twitter to study the spread of misinformation and hate speech or research public health or how people behave online.
Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at The George Washington University, used the Twitter API to track conversations on Twitter to see what kinds of tweets elicited attacks from trolls — and what got them to go away — in one study.
“With so little information from Twitter about the practicalities of this new policy, the specifics of it, we just don’t know where to go. We have no way to do the planning. And for many of us who are in the field, running programs, running projects that have real-world consequences, that’s pretty scary,” she said.
Twitter wasn’t alone, but was unique among social media companies, in making its API open and free. TikTok, for instance, is working on it now but so far has not released its API. Facebook's is more limited because the company is very protective of the data it collects.
Tromble said social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others are taking steps to increase researcher access and transparency — largely due to new European regulations. Twitter, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction.
“They’ve gone from first in class to absolute dead last," she said.
It costs money to maintain an API. And, as a private company, Twitter is free to charge for its tools. But researchers and developers say it wouldn’t take much for Musk to carve out exceptions for academic research and nonprofits.
“No other technology has changed society as quickly and as profoundly as social media. Having access to the thoughts and emotions of other people worldwide, that’s a fundamental change to society,” said Kristina Lerman, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California who studies misinformation. “And you can’t understand it without access to data, access to observe.”
Takeshi Kawamoto, a Japanese software developer who runs a popular earthquake alert bot with more than 3 million followers, created the account back in 2007 as a hobby.
There are an incredible number of such bots on Twitter — useful, friendly or quirky accounts set up by people or groups with a specific interest. There are weather bots, tools that combine long Twitter threads into one easy-to-read file, bots that send quotes from famous books or people, bots that remind you to stand up and stretch at random intervals during the day, bots that insert a little bit of nonsense and weirdness into your Twitter scrolling.
The earthquake bot Kawamoto created didn’t take off until the devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that hit Japan, when people turned to it for information about quakes and aftershocks.