Official New York City subway, bus and train announcements are heading back to Twitter after the tech company backed down from its demand for an annual fee of more than $500,000 for the ability to do so, the MTA said Thursday.
“The MTA informed Twitter senior management that it would not pay to provide the public with critical service information,” said Shanifah Rieara, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chief customer officer.
“Twitter got the message.”
The MTA announced last week it would no longer Twitter to inform riders about service changes and delays, citing two instances of being locked out of Twitter’s API, which is the programming back-end software that automatically tweets service alerts when they are posted to the MTA’s website or in-station signage.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has long teased a plan to roll back free access to the API.
While Rieara said last week that the MTA would not pay Twitter in order to post, Thursday’s statement was the first time the MTA confirmed Twitter’s demand for the $500,000-plus fee.
Twitter walked back its payment demand on Tuesday, with its development team tweeting that “Verified gov[ernment] or publicly owned services who tweet weather alerts, transport updates and emergency notifications may use the API, for these critical purposes, for free.”
“One of the most important use cases for the Twitter API has always been public utility,” the tweet said.
Rieara said Thursday that Twitter had assured the MTA in writing that the platform would be reliable going forward.
“We will continue to closely monitor to ensure Twitter meets the reliability standard riders deserve,” Rieara said.
The MTA resumed tweeting service announcements at 4 p.m. Thursday — just in time to alert homeward commuters to 15- to 20-minute delays caused by signal problems on the Long Island Rail Road.
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply