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> Why does Twitter need to be involved on the client side with consumption of the API?

They don't need to be involved, they want to be involved, and they have the legal backing to do so.

Can you provide any citation for them having "legal backing"? I literally participate in hearings at the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress over people providing adversarial interoperability and I have never seen any functional legal argument against such.

The CFAA forbids unauthorized use of an API. By banning third-party clients, Twitter is making it very clear what constitutes unauthorized use.

I see plenty of discussion about CFAA being used against scrapers, particularly automated "bot" scrapers, but I don't see anything about alternative clients, where a human consumer of the service is barred from using the API. But I also only did cursory searching, so some sources for CFAA applied to API would be helpful.

I'm not sure how this would be any different than other software projects that use an API they don't own. Things like Cider for Apple Music, Ripcord for Slack, and the many Spotify clients all come to mind. Perhaps those are less aggressive in pursing 3rd party clients?

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