Famous Twitter bot to shut down next week

Twitter says next week it will cut free access to its third-party API, replacing it with a "paid basic tier" for an unspecified price on February 9. The news potentially affects many Twitter services, one of which is bots - not the armies of spammers new owner Elon Musk claims to have been purging. Still, the countless automated accounts posting cute animals and quotes from fictional characters and accessibility aids through the Twitter API. While Twitter has left users in a dilemma about its upcoming change, many bot creators have resigned themselves to shutting down.

"My read of those tweets from Twitter is that it's going to stop working," says V Buckenham of his Cheap Bots Done Quick service. Released in 2015, Cheap Bots Done Quick is a bot-building tool for people new to working with the Twitter API, which currently powers around 54,000 Twitter bot accounts. But next week, unless Twitter backtracks on its announcement, Buckenham expects it just to snap.

Several individual Twitter bot accounts have tweeted that they will likely be shut down if the change goes through. The list contains Alt Text Reader, which tweets easy-to-find text descriptions of images for blind Twitter users. Includes Colorschemer, which offers bizarre colour combinations with surreal names. You can say goodbye to SauceBot, which searches for the original creators of unattributed art. And you'll find other creators making similar statements in the quote tweets from the original post.

The change is not necessarily a surprise. Even before Musk, Twitter had a strained relationship with bot creators. API changes in 2018, for example, broke some automated accounts. But Musk has shown particular hostility towards bots, which he describes as a vector for spam and scams. Moreover, while Twitter has reversed some previous decisions, the company has shown a willingness to wean away dedicated followers, such as third-party Twitter app developers, who had their Twitter API cut last month. And Twitter has been aggressively adding paid features since its acquisition, putting the company under a huge debt burden.

Twitter called its API "among the world's most powerful data sets," suggesting that it's primarily interested in building relationships with companies that want to view and analyze tweets rather than post them. Bots are a tiny market in comparison. "If you're building a service on someone else's platform, and it's doing something where there's not an obvious way that they're making money from you doing that, then you're building on sand," says Buckenham. "It is going to last a certain amount of time, and then it's going to die."