Twitter said on Monday that it will expand free access to social networking site data to help software developers develop tools and products to promote safer online conversations or curate content. This move is part of Twitter’s ongoing efforts to decentralize the company over the past year. This vision aims to give users greater control over what they see in Twitter feeds or new ways to share content on the site. Amir Shevat, Twitter’s developer platform product leader, said in an interview.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies are facing global censorship on how their algorithms present certain content and their role in allowing misinformation or hate speech to spread, so efforts to increase developer access rights follow. Starting from Monday, developers can access the data of up to 2 million tweets for free through Twitter’s application programming interface (API) every month. Shevat said the company has also changed its API policy to allow more use cases, including removing restrictions on competition with Twitter.

“I hope everyone can define their own preferences and have selected content that suits them,” Shevat said. “We can only do this with the participation of developers.” Some examples of applications built using Twitter data include Block Party, which was created by software engineer Tracy Chou to allow Twitter users to filter out content they don’t want to see.

Another application developed by software engineer Janique-ka John makes it easier for users to search Twitter Spaces, the company’s real-time audio chat feature.

News Source : Gadgets 360