Twitter Reverses Course, Restores Free API Access for Government Weather and Transit Alerts

Twitter will allow public institutions such as transit agencies and the National Weather Service to post large volumes of automated tweets for free, provided that the accounts doing so are "verified gov or publicly owned services." This comes after a backlash to Twitter's paid plans, which restricted third parties from easily accessing Twitter's application programming interface. However, it is unclear how Twitter plans to ensure that critical public safety and transit accounts will be "verified" without forcing institutions to pay for API access.