By now, we have all seen how Elon is shaking things up at Twitter HQ, but it seems one of the most recent changes to come into effect may be the most problematic of all – the death of the Twitter API.
Twitter API Ban
On 13th February 2023, Twitter was due to end free access to its API – the backend functionality that allows users to build bots to automatically post and respond to tweets on the site.
Why?
To ‘clean things up’. Twitter (or Elon Musk in particular) wanted to remove the ‘noise’ from Twitter to make it a better place to be.
Instead, they will now be changing a minimum of $100 a month for access to the API.
However, it’s important to note that Twitter announced shortly after the 13th Feb that this deadline has been extended, although we haven’t been told an exact date for this.
Twitter API Problems
The issue with this huge change is that it will prevent Twitter researchers from accessing its data, used to track spread of misinformation – which is very important for a news focused platform like Twitter.
Twitter API & Social Media Scheduling
What’s more, this change has potential to affect businesses around the world.
We are yet to learn whether this API ban will impact scheduling tools that many businesses use to stay on top of keeping their profiles up-to-date, however should Twitter ban these APIs from being used, it could mean that social scheduling tools can no longer be used with the platform.
At time of publishing this article (20th Feb 2023), our own social scheduling tool Loomly has not had any problems pushing Twitter posts directly to the platform, however we will keep a close eye on this and will update this post should anything change.
Twitter API & Website Embeds
Many company websites have a Twitter feed embedded on the website, pulling in recent tweets from that company. Again, we are yet to learn if this API change will affect these embeds. However, we have yet to see any disruption on our client websites that have Twitter embeds on them.
We are closely monitoring the situation with the Twitter API and how it is affecting businesses. One thing is certain – Twitter sure is keeping us on our toes.
