New York Subway Breaks With Twitter After $50,000 Bill

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has immediately discontinued Twitter updates to customers due to a reported high price tag and the unreliability of the network.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk, following his $44 billion acquisition of the company in October 2022, announced an $8-a-month Twitter Blue subscription service that he said would vastly minimize the impact of bots on the social media network.

The service finally went into effect on April 20, removing the infamous blue checkmarks from innumerable "legacy" accounts previously connected to "notable" figures "in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category."

Twitter asked the MTA to pay $50,000 a month to continue accessing the platform's application programming interface, or API, according to Bloomberg. The agency also claimed that it was never presented a timeline by Twitter of when older accounts would lose access.

"The MTA does not pay tech platforms to publish service information and has built redundant tools that provide service alerts in real time," MTA Acting Chief Customer Shanifah Rieara said in a statement posted Thursday on their website. "Those include the MYmta and TrainTime apps, the MTA's homepage at MTA.info, email alerts and text messages.

"Service alerts are also available on thousands of screens in stations, on trains and in buses. The MTA has terminated posting service information to Twitter, effective immediately, as the reliability of the platform can no longer be guaranteed."

Rieara told Bloomberg that she doesn't believe paying to issue service-related updates via Twitter is "the best use of resources" when other "internal and homegrown" resources already exist and are, in her words, more reliable.

"We want to communicate with our customers through all platforms, but we need a platform that is reliant and consistent and up to date," she added.

The MTA's access to Twitter through its API was "involuntarily interrupted twice" in the last two weeks, on April 14 and April 27, Rieara said in accompaniment of her statement.

The current @MTA account, which now has a yellow checkmark and is followed by 1.3 million users, and related accounts like @nyct_subway, will remain active for branding and responding to any customer-related questions and inquiries.

The MTA has a $600 million budget deficit this year that is expected to increase to approximately $3 billion by 2025, Bloomberg reported.

When contacted by Newsweek via email, Rieara reiterated the same statement that was published Thursday.

Air France has taken similar measures.

"Since Twitter has changed their conditions, our customer service by direct message on this network is unavailable," the airline tweeted Friday. "Our servicing teams remains available on our other channels. We thank you for your understanding."

An Air France spokesperson told Newsweek via email that, like the MTA's complaints, API was an issue.

"Twitter's recent change in access to its API has led us to adapt our commercial policy in terms of customer relations," the airline said. "We no longer offer customer service by private message on this platform at the moment, but our commercial teams are still available via the usual channels, including other social networks."

Musk has argued that his changes to Twitter reflect a politically neutral and "fair" policy.

But the move has led to over half of Twitter's top 1,000 advertisers discontinuing advertising on the platform since Musk's taking over, according to data from digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics that was shared with CNN, Vox and other media outlets.

"Twitter, like any other private company, has an incentive to generate as much revenue as possible," Ryan McCormick, managing partner at Goldman McCormick PR, told Newsweek via email. "From a PR perspective, are they taking an unnecessary reputation risk by charging the MTA a fee to use their API? I don't believe they are.

"Airlines are among several industries which provide updates to their customers in real-time through their website and text messages. No one is stopping the MTA from doing this. If Twitter was charging users to receive updates on the MTA's account, that would be something which could easily turn into a reputation crisis."

Twitter's revenue then decreased by 40 percent by December, according to the Wall Street Journal.