Last week, Twitter said it is shutting down free access to its APIs starting February 9. Now, days before the deadline, Elon Musk said that after getting feedback from developers, Twitter will provide a write-only API for “bots providing good content that is free.”
This decision is as opaque as some of the other policy decisions under Musk’s management. There is no information on what constitutes “good content” and who will decide that. However, if Twitter ends up implementing this rule, some bots will get a new lifeline on the social network.
Following the announcement, a lot of developers who made fun of bots criticized the decision, saying that their automation provided free content to people and in turn enhanced the services. Last week, BuzzFeed interviewed several bot developers who were unhappy with the decision. These include @_restaurant_bot which tweets random photos of restaurants and @_weather_bot_which tweets images of different places with weather updates.