It's still anticompetitive. Can't wait to see Twitter get destroyed in court for this.

Very true, they don’t have to give access to their API for free. My question is, why don’t devs use Puppeteer to spin up a Chromium instance and access Twitter’s data that way?

That’s part of the reason that “it’s to stop the bots” is BS. Academia and other similar uses will pay or just stop. Bots and other malicious uses will find work-arounds and just change where the game of whack-a-bot is being played.

Twitter could add anti-bot protection like Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA. I’ve seen that make a site unusable with Puppeteer. By “unusable” I mean that correctly solving the CAPTCHA either just gives you another CAPTCHA, or gives the “click if you are human” thing, and clicking that just goes to a CAPTCHA or another “click if you are human”.

It didn’t even require doing anything to/on the page with Puppeteer. Merely using it to open a browser window and then waiting, and using that browser window by hand during the wait to go visit the site that was using Cloudflare anti-bot protection ran into the problem.

I actually face the same issue on Firefox with some websites except I’m not using Puppeteer. I thought it was a glitch with Cloudflare but guess not.

IIRC, puppeteer/webdriver things generally work by injecting JS through extension, and their presence can be detected by looking for those objects/functions from JS.

Isn’t there a stealth plugin that can hide the injected JavaScript?

I think anyone can request a download of archive of all their data, and removing that would violate at least GDPR. And then do whatever they want with this archive, including uploading to anywhere else. So while it disrupts the current process, it cannot really take the competitors out.