WaPo article: https://archive.is/wip/sgViP
Company owner Elon Musk tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” to deter third-party scraping of data from the social media platform. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote.
User "elonmusk" not found
This had better be a very temporary measure or Twitter is screwed. Universal visibility is pretty much the most important thing they offer their users.
One issue I can see, the local bus company puts all of their last minute service updates for cancelled buses on Twitter and only Twitter. So today, if you need to know if your bus has been cancelled before travel, you must have a Twitter account to view them.
Another issue is that the local news groups now only put their news on social media and the social media firms have put them behind a log in wall. No social media accounts, no local news unless you wait up to a week to pay for the newspaper and that's on borrowed time already.
And many companies, even my electric and gas company, now only do timely customer service via Twitter. So if you don't have a Twitter account, you're stuffed and at best stuck waiting weeks for service.
Good god! Where is this happening?
Worldwide. Twitter has replaced a whole load of services that companies would have to host themselves and pay the bandwidth and storage costs for. Instead, Twitter pays for it. Now Elon's had enough of their freeloading and so if you don't have a Twitter account, you can't get news, service updates or timely customer services from these companies.