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LOWELL, MA – Last Friday, Congresswoman Lori Trahan (MA-03), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Innovation, Data, and Commerce Subcommittee, led a group of lawmakers in writing to Twitter CEO Elon Musk requesting information on Twitter’s planned changes to their API access and pricing model. The letter follows Twitter’s announcement of their new pricing structure for enterprise API access, which could cost researchers up to $210,000 per month for the most comprehensive package.

“Your initial announcement to shutter free access to the Twitter API by February 9th, your subsequent pivot on February 8th announcing a new form of free API access, paid basic access for certain usages, and deprecation of the Premium API, and most recently a delay without a specified release date for the new API platform that has not received an update since February 17th have created a great deal of confusion and uncertainty amongst developers and researchers who rely on consistent access to a stable API for their work,” the lawmakers wrote. “This stands in contradiction to your past public commitments to make Twitter more transparent.”

Twitter’s new pricing model would put in jeopardy publications and academic projects that rely on Twitter’s API to better understand online safety, misinformation, foreign influence operations, and other pressing issues. Since 2020, there have been over 17,500 academic papers produced based on data accessed through this API, a number that would likely drop dramatically as academic budgets would be unable to keep pace with Musk’s new pricing structure.

Trahan has long led the charge for researcher access to social media data. Last year, she introduced the Digital Services Oversight and Safety Act, which would create an Office of Independent Researcher Access at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission tasked with standing up and overseeing a system through which certified researchers can study the impacts of covered platforms.

After Musk’s takeover of Twitter last year, Trahan sent a letter to Musk requesting answers to questions about the future of Twitter’s transparency policies and researcher access. While that letter remains unanswered, a Twitter representative told Trahan’s team during a staff briefing in December 2022 that the company had no plans to limit researcher access and that Musk would not retaliate against researchers or journalists who post criticisms of the platform. That same day, Musk banned a number of journalists from Twitter. Most recently in February 2023, Trahan issued a statement warning of these dangers after Musk first announced his decision to end access to the platform’s free API.

Trahan was joined by Representatives Sean Casten (IL-06) and Adam Schiff (CA-30). To better understand Musk’s researcher access policies, the lawmakers requested answers to the following questions by April 3, 2023:

1. Why is Twitter changing the API access and pricing structure, in particular for the Academic Research API?
2. Will researchers that are already approved for the Academic Research API be grandfathered into an equivalent level of access in the new APIs?
3. Please list all differences, especially decreases, in the types of data and volume of data between the Academic Research API, new free API, new paid basic API, and the new enterprise API tiers.
4. Do you plan on providing free or discounted API access for academic researchers after releasing your new API platform? If so, when would that API be released, what would the cost be, and how would it differ from existing APIs? If you have no plans for this, why not?
5. Will you commit to not increasing the price of and not decreasing the level of access provided by your new API platform?
6. What is the approval process for determining access to a modified free version of the API for Twitter account bots “providing good content”? Would bots that could objectively report negative information about Twitter be deemed as providers of “good content”?

A copy of the letter sent last Friday can be accessed HERE.

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