The social media platform Twitter used to share “precise, complete and unbiased data from the public conversation” with developers, academics, students and nonprofit organizations for free.
That is changing. Twitter’s development team announced on Feb. 8 that the platform will soon start charging $100 a month for low-level use of application programming interfaces (APIs), or tools used to access data that users chose to share with the world.
None of the other major social media platforms offer similar API access. Facebook limited access to API after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, although some data from Facebook public accounts is available for free through a Meta tool called CrowdTangle.
