• The one free Twitter API was recently given paywalls but now that decision has been reversed for some accounts.
• Verified government or publicly owned services which tweet weather alerts, transport updates, and emergency notifications may use the API for free.
• These organisations will still seemingly have to pay for verification which costs R18 100 to get this free API access.

The tenure of Elon Musk as the owner of Twitter has been marked by decisions being made only for those decisions to be reversed in some way because the way things were, were that way for a reason. Today’s example of this is API access.

Where once access to the API was free, it has now been given a limited free tier and two more paywalled tiers. Of those paid options the Basic tier costs $100 per month and the Enterprise tier starts at $42 000 per month.

The decision to monetise the API in this way left many researchers in the dark, but more so, public services and utilities could no longer use Twitter to issue alerts and updates.

One example of this was the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York which until the end of last month was issuing service information via Twitter.

“For the MTA, Twitter is no longer reliable for providing the consistent updates riders expect. So as of today, we’re saying goodbye to it for service alerts and information,” the body wrote on Twitter.

The Bay Rapid Transit service also experienced interruptions to its operations on Twitter due to API access problems, according to The Verge.

Now Twitter has seemingly changed its tune regarding API access for some accounts.

“One of the most important use cases for the Twitter API has always been public utility. Verified gov or publicly owned services who tweet weather alerts, transport updates and emergency notifications may use the API, for these critical purposes, for free,” the Twitter Dev account posted.

We suspect that this means that a public utility would still have to pay R18 100 per month to receive a verification checkmark and the grey government stamp that shows it’s a verified organisation. It all just feels like the old system this time with more cost to governments.

All of this while Musk is berating the likes of NPR.

According to a report by Engadget, Musk allegedly emailed an NPR reporter asking if the organisation was going to start posting on Twitter again or if the account should be reassigned.

This not only goes against Twitter’s own terms of service which require a user to log in once every 30 days to keep an account active. The user doesn’t have to do anything else. However, Musk has allegedly said that the policy of the firm is now to recycle handles that are definitely dormant. Whether this is indeed the case or Musk throwing threats around is unclear.

NPR left Twitter after it was slapped with a “Government-funded media” label, a label it said didn’t reflect that it was a private non-profit company with editorial independence. Twitter has since removed these labels, yet another example of the flip-flop attitude the platform is currently being run with.

Perhaps tomorrow well know personalities, politicians and other public figures will be able to apply for free verification to curb impersonation. You never know what’s going to happen next at Twitter 2.0