>Twitter’s API is used by vast numbers of researchers. Since 2020, there have been more than 17,500 academic papers based on the platform’s data, giving strength to the argument that Twitter owner Elon Musk has long claimed, that the platform is the “de facto town square.” > >But new charges, included in documentation seen by WIRED, suggest that most organizations that have relied on API access to conduct research will now be priced out of using Twitter. > >It’s the end of a long, convoluted process. On February 2, Musk announced API access would go behind a paywall in a week. (Those producing “good” content would be exempted.) A week later, he delayed the decision to February 13. Unsurprisingly, that deadline also slipped by, as Twitter suffered a catastrophic outage. > >The company is now offering three levels of Enterprise Packages to its developer platform, according to a document sent by a Twitter rep to would-be academic customers in early March and passed on to WIRED. The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months. > >“I don’t know if there’s an academic on the planet who could afford $42,000 a month for Twitter,” says Jeremy Blackburn, assistant professor at Binghamton University in New York and a member of the iDRAMA Lab, which analyzes hate speech on social media—including on Twitter. > >Elissa M. Redmiles, a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, says the new prices are eye-watering. “It’s probably outside of any academic budget I’ve ever heard of,” she says, adding that the price would put off any long-term analysis of user sentiment. “One month of Twitter data isn’t really going to work for the purposes people have,” she says. > >Kenneth Joseph, assistant professor at the University of Buffalo and one of the authors of a recent paper analyzing a day in the life of Twitter, says the new pricing effectively kills his career. “$42,000 is not something I can pay for a single month in any reasonable way,” says. “It totally destroys any opportunity to engage in research in this space, which I’ve in many respects built a career on.” > >The pricing documents were provided to WIRED by a researcher who asked for anonymity, since they are still accessing Twitter data through an existing API agreement and worry it could be terminated if they were identified. They say the new costs were “not viable for the academic community.” > >“No one can afford to pay that,” they say. “Even rich institutions can’t afford to pay half a million a year for a thimbleful of data.”

From a lay perspective, it looks like this kind of pricing scheme for API access is designed to eliminate the possibility of independent research on the platform more than it is to generate revenues for the company.