Twitter to paywall API from February 9, stokes concern among popular bots

Twitter’s API, short for application programming interface, will be paywalled from February 9. This has the potential to affect a host of services that rely on it, including popular bots that make automated posts on the platform.

Twitter API is like a set of instructions that tell a program how to interact with Twitter. It allows people to build software that can post tweets, read tweets, and perform other actions on Twitter.

“Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead,” the Twitter Dev account tweeted Thursday. Twitter did not say how much this new paid basic tier would cost, though.