A Twitter user responded to the API change saying Ad revenue must be down. To this DOGE creator, Billy Markus replied “it’s more about raising the friction to make bots”.
Elon Musk justified the API change by saying that free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators.
He added that there’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things.
On Feb 5, Musk in the same thread detailed that write-only API for bots providing good content that is free.
Musk's tweet raises numerous questions such as what is good content and whether the policy will apply to future bots or just those already in existence.