Elon Musk has made several controversial decisions at Twitter since taking over. However, perhaps none garnered as much criticism as the choice to cut off important public service and safety accounts from Twitter's API unless they subscribed to the new and exorbitantly priced Enterprise plan.
Nevertheless, on Tuesday, Twitter appears to have reversed its decision.
"One of the most crucial use cases for the Twitter API has always been public utility," the official Twitter account @TwitterDev tweeted. "Verified government or publicly owned services that provide weather alerts, transport updates, and emergency notifications may use the API for these critical purposes free of charge."
The move to make exceptions for important accounts that were recently cut off from Twitter's API is undoubtedly a welcome one. Twitter's initial strict position was that anyone beyond the small $100 "hobbyist" plan had to subscribe to an Enterprise plan, which starts at $42,000 per month.
Twitter's new API policies resulted in numerous independent developers being compelled to shut down their Twitter-based apps over the past month. Consequently, emergency weather alert accounts maintained by the National Weather Service (NWS) and public transit alert accounts like the MTA's NYC Subway accounts announced they would no longer be able to provide their vital, automated, real-time alert services on Twitter.
Twitter's decision to cut off the NWS and MTA faced more backlash from users than any of its recent unpopular decisions. These types of accounts have always played a pivotal role in Twitter's ecosystem since the platform's early days, contributing to Twitter's status as a hub for breaking news updates.
Many details are still unclear, such as the criteria for an account to be considered "verified." Does the agency merely need to prove ownership, or is an official Twitter-verified account a requirement? In addition, a deleted tweet from the MTA-run NYC Subway account indicated that they hadn't been informed of the changes at Twitter yet.
Positive surprises in the news have become increasingly rare for Twitter, making this announcement a refreshing departure, even if it involves reversing a prior seemingly ill-advised decision.