It appears Twitter’s roughly decade-long position as the most open and research-friendly social platform is coming to an end.
Last Wednesday, the company announced its new free and paid API tiers. The bottom line is Twitter is killing off the free API that offered the ability to pull a significant amount of tweets and related data. The old free API was used by researchers and developers to build useful tools to investigate accounts and conversations on the platform. I’m talking about tools like Twinfoleak, TweetBeaver, Foller.me, etc.
The new API tiers are laid out in this Twitter thread. The new free API as announced does not allow you to request tweets. You can use it to post a small amount of data/content to Twitter, but you can’t pull tweets for analysis.
The new “hobbyist” paid API tier allows you to get 10,000 tweets per month for $100/month. That’s tiny compared to what was previously offered for free, and does not support OSINT and research tool use cases, according to the people I spoke to.
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