[minimaxir]

It's a shame access to this API is limited to academic institutions, as many social media/misinformation researchers are now independent or affiliated with journalistic institutions.

[trident5000]

Misinformation and troll farms on Twitter start with unrestricted API usage to the masses.

[Nextgrid]

Misinformation & troll farms appear to do just fine with the current restricted API.

What evidence is there that read-only API access will make it significantly easier for them (enough to outweigh the other upsides)?

[trident5000]

So you're telling me API's are not useful while at the same time telling me that API's are useful. Trolls want API access for the same reason researchers want access. You could argue research is the first step to becoming an effective troll.

[Nextgrid]

I don't see API access as being necessary for a small-scale trolling operation, and large scale operations have enough resources to work around the lack of API by scraping.

I'm not saying that API access is completely useless, I was raising the question of whether the potential (and relatively small) benefit to trolling outweighs the major upsides of API access being available for all.