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by riffic 1660 days ago
> behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level users

Twitter licenses premium data APIs. Twitter's "VIP level" users are those that pay significant amounts of money to consume these data APIs to extrapolate whatever sort of information the data can provide.

You can research and confirm this yourself but sources for my assertion:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-24397472

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/19/what-will-happen-t...

If you're paying money to Twitter for this sort of info, Twitter bends over backwards to support you.