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Today, we’re introducing an entirely rewritten Twitter Developer Policy to help you as developers to better understand our rules. We’ve heard that the existing policy was difficult to follow, so we’ve shortened it from eight sections to four, with simpler language and terminology.

It is very important that you review the Developer Policy and associated terms, as they explain how we expect you to use our platform and APIs.

Some key updates:

  • Changes to enable the use of the Twitter API in academic research use cases that study topics such as spam, abuse, or other health-related issues, in a non-commercial context.

  • Improvements to resyndication volumes of Tweet IDs and User IDs, if this is in the context of non-commercial research and on behalf of an academic institution.

  • A requirement to inform Twitter if the original use case associated with a developer account changes substantially.

  • Our new policy asks that developers clearly indicate (in their account bio or profile) if they are operating a bot account, what the account is, and who the person behind it is, so it’s easier for everyone on Twitter to know what’s a bot - and what’s not.

  • An outline of the specific scenarios where the matching of Twitter data with off-Twitter sources (CRM systems etc) is permitted.

We’ve also updated some of the language in our Twitter Developer Agreement to better align with the Policy’s structural changes. The new Developer Agreement language now includes additional requirements around Licensed Materials and Twitter Content removals.

We’d like to remind you of our guidance around user authentication within your applications. Twitter allows developers to obtain user access tokens through the 3-legged OAuth flow, which allows an application to obtain an access token and access token secret by redirecting a user to Twitter to authorize an application. Please review our authentication tips that provide good practices and other guidance on security on our developer website. If your solution has high-profile end users, including users with Verified Twitter accounts, we ask that you offer your end users strong login security measures, including two-factor authentication.

You can read more about the updates to the policy in our blog post, or by visiting the Developer Policy directly.

Please use the Rules and Policies category for questions related to these updates.

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