In the wake of devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, thousands of volunteer software developers are using Twitter’s essential tool to comb the platform for help – including from people trapped in collapsed buildings – and connecting people with rescue organisations.
equal may lose access as soon as there is unless they pay Twitter a monthly fee of at least $100 – prohibitive for many volunteers and nonprofits on a shoestring budget.
“This is not only for the rescue efforts which unfortunately have ended, but also for the logistical planning when people go to Twitter to broadcast their needs,” said Sedat Kapanoglu, the founder of Eksi Sozluk, the most popular social platform in Turkey, which has advised some volunteers in efforts.
Nonprofits, researchers and others need these tools, known as APIs, or Application Developer Interfaces, to analyze Twitter data because the sheer amount of information makes it impossible for humans to sift through it by hand.
Kapanoglu said hundreds of “good Samaritans” have provided their own premium paid API access keys (Twitter already offers a paid version with more features) to use in the rescue effort. But he said this is not “sustainable or the right way” to do this. It may violate Twitter’s rules.
Monday is the deadline Twitter set for shutting down free access to its API, an additional challenge for thousands of developers in Turkey and beyond who are working around the clock to use Twitter’s unique and open ecosystem for disaster relief.
“For Turkish coders who work with the Twitter API for the purpose of monitoring disasters, this is especially worrying – and I imagine it is also worrying for others around the world who use Twitter data to monitor emergencies and politically contested events,” said Akin Unver, professor of relations international at Ozyegin University in Istanbul.
The new fees are just the latest complication for programmers, academics and others trying to use AP — and they say communicating with anyone at the company has become impossible since Elon Musk took over.
Paywall API is Musk’s latest attempt to squeeze revenue from Twitter, which is on the hook for about $1 billion in annual interest payments from the billionaire’s acquisition, completed in October.
It’s not just disaster relief groups that are concerned. Academic and non-governmental researchers have been using Twitter for years to study the spread of misinformation and hate speech or public health research or how people behave online.
Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University, used Twitter’s API to track conversations on Twitter to see what types of tweets led to attacks from trolls — and what caused them to disappear — in a study. .
“With little information from Twitter about the practicality of this new policy, the specifics, we don’t know where to go. We have no way to do planning. And for many of us who are in the field, running programs, running projects that have real consequences, that it’s pretty scary,” he said.
Twitter is not alone but unique among social media companies in making its API open and free. TikTok, for example, is currently working on it but has not yet released an API. Facebook is more limited because it is very protective of the data it collects.
Tromble said social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others are taking steps to increase access and transparency for researchers – largely because of new European regulations. Twitter, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction.
“He was first class until he finally died,” he said.
It costs money to maintain the API. As a private company, Twitter is free to charge for these tools. But researchers and developers say Musk doesn’t need many exemptions for academic and nonprofit research.
“There is no other technology that changes society as quickly and as social media. Having access to the thoughts and emotions of other people around the world, this is a fundamental change for society,” said Kristina Lerman, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California who studies incorrect information. “And you can’t know without access to data, access to observe.”
Takeshi Kawamoto, a Japanese software developer who opened a popular earthquake alert bots with over 3 million followers, created the account in 2007 as a hobby.
There are an incredible number of bots on Twitter – useful, friendly or strange accounts created by people or groups with specific interests. There are weather bots, tools that merge long Twitter threads into one easy-to-read file, bots that send you quotes from books or famous people, bots that remind you to stand up and stretch at random intervals during the day, bots that insert a little nonsense and weird into scrolling Twitter.
Kawamoto’s earthquake bots didn’t stop until the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that hit Japan, when people started asking for information about earthquakes and aftershocks.
Kawamoto was ready to kill the bot when Twitter first announced it would charge for API access. Paying $1,200 a year for an account that will definitely make no profit is not going to work. Last week, Twitter announced that it would make a small exception to offer free “write-only” API access to accounts that send fewer than 1,500 tweets per month.
That might help, but Kawamoto said the 1,500 limit would be problematic after a large earthquake with aftershocks. They want to ask Musk to allow his account to post more than 1,500 tweets on a pay-as-you-go basis.
So far, Twitter has not issued any other exceptions, although it is possible that Musk will see one of the tweets from a developer working on earthquake relief who has asked for a solution.
For Mark Sample and a small army of Twitter bots, such as one that will be carefully curated quotes from Herman Melville “Moby Dick” at random intervals, it is too late. The Moby Dick bot, as well as the one that posted computer clip images from 1994 and one called “strange satellite” have all left Twitter. Some have moved to Mastodon, a social platform that some Twitter users have moved to.
Sample bots are part of “weird Twitter,” a quirky subculture of Twitter that peaked in the mid-2010s and included weird, fun, nonsensical bots sending random bursts into people’s feeds.
“I’m like going through a grieving process, grieving. The API…Twitter does something that other social media platforms don’t do, like having this open playground,” said Sample, a professor of digital studies at Davidson College in North Carolina. “I mean, there are ways for people to take advantage and destroy things and use them in malicious ways. But it’s also a great playground for fans and creative people. No other social media platform has that. In some ways in the API when the one thing Twitter does, the only thing that sets it apart.
For Sample, the breaking point is not the API announcement. It came last fall when Musk began firing at Twitter workers and going after reporters who questioned or criticized him, he said. Building an app for a platform when someone is killing it all, he says, “isn’t a good use of time and creative energy.”
“I mean, it’s been going well. It’s been like 15 years or something. So it’s been going pretty well. And maybe it’s time for another one.