The subheadline here is actually: "Social media firm cuts access to Dataminr, a service used to identify unfolding terror attacks, political unrest"
So, Dataminr is a startup that had the firehose to do that kind of analysis.
All this could be is them putting a company that is built on top of Twitter out of business. They have done this plenty of times. Seems pretty heavily spun to make it sound like they are taking some sort of moral high ground.
Dataminr didn't provide access to the firehose, iirc, but had a really good event detection product. I had actually heard of them because I heard CNN was a very happy user of the product.
EDIT: >The move doesn’t affect Dataminr’s service to financial industry, news media or other clients outside the intelligence community. The Wall Street Journal is involved in a trial of Dataminr’s news product.
Read the article, and it seems media companies still have access. I guess Twitter is telling another company who their customers can and can't be.