Mozilla, activists write open letter to Musk to return free access to Twitter APIs

A group of activists, researchers, and civil bodies released an open letter on February 6 against Twitter’s decision to stop free access to Twitter application programming interfaces (APIs). Led by civil society body Coalition for Independent Technology Research, the letter has been signed by close to 450 institutes and activists like Mozilla, Citizen and Technology Lab, and Human Cooperation Lab (at Massachusetts Institute of Technology), among others. 

The authors of the letter said that to date, Twitter API has enabled several public-interest research works for national security, public health, economic analysis, child safety, and online violence, among others. The signatories argue that restricting free access to Twitter API would significantly impact these projects.

The letter further said that the same independent research community helped implement several transparency-related measures which were undertaken after Elon Musk took over the reins at the microblogging website. “API access has provided a critical resource for that work. Twitter’s new barriers to data access will reduce the very transparency that both the platform and our societies desperately need,” the activists wrote. 

Last week, Twitter announced that it would no longer be supporting free access to version 1.1 and version 2 of the APIs from February 9. At that time, Musk tweeted that ‘bot scammers and opinion manipulators’ have been abusing free APIs. He added, “Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.” However, this move received huge flak from the developer community. 

Your api didn't update for like 3 month since the takeover, you suspended legit 3rd party app and NOW we wont be able to use it for free?? Even Facebook and youtube api are free and they are updated

— ͏ (@Raph9213) February 2, 2023

Considering the API was being used for public safety, great job guys.

— Ed Oswald (@edoswald) February 2, 2023

After facing a strong reaction to this announcement, Musk tweeted on February 5 that Twitter API would remain free to ‘good bots’.  

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

That said, neither Twitter nor Musk have clarified which bots would be considered ‘good’.