after that Devastating earthquake in Turkey and SyriaThousands of volunteer software developers are using a vital Twitter tool to comb the platform for help — including from people trapped in collapsed buildings — and to connect people with rescue organizations.
They may soon lose access unless they pay Twitter a monthly fee of at least $100 — prohibitive for many volunteers and nonprofits on low budgets.
Explained | Why were Turkey’s earthquakes so deadly?
“It’s not just for the rescue efforts, which unfortunately we’re coming to an end, but also for logistics planning, as people start broadcasting their needs,” said Sedat Kapanoglu, founder of Turkey’s most popular social platform Eksi Sözlük. Go to Twitter for.” who are mentoring some of the volunteers in their endeavours.
Nonprofits, researchers and others need tools known as APIs, or application programming interfaces, to analyze Twitter data because the sheer volume of information makes it impossible for a human to go through it by hand.
Mr Kapanoglu says hundreds of “good Samaritans” are offering their own, premium paid API access keys (Twitter already offered a paid version with more features) for use in the rescue effort. But he says this is not a “sustainable or correct way” to do so. It may also be against Twitter’s rules.
The loss of free API access means an additional challenge for thousands of developers in Turkey and beyond who are working around the clock to harness Twitter’s unique, open ecosystem for disaster relief.
“For Turkish coders working with the Twitter API for disaster monitoring purposes, this is particularly worrying – and I think it is equally worrying for others around the world dealing with emergencies and political are using Twitter data to monitor competitive events,” said Akin Unvar, professor of international relations at Ozygin University in Istanbul.
The new fees are the latest complication for programmers, academics and others trying to use the API – and they say it has become essentially impossible to communicate with anyone at the company. since Elon Musk took over,
Twitter originally planned to introduce the changes last week, but postponed it until February 13. On Monday, the company tweeted that it was delaying the re-launch “for a few more days,” without providing further details.
The API paywall is Mr Musk’s latest attempt to squeeze revenue out of Twitter, which is on the hook for $1 billion in annual interest payments from the billionaire’s acquisition, which was completed in October.
It’s not just disaster relief groups who are concerned. For years, academic and non-governmental researchers have used Twitter to spread misinformation and hate speech, or to conduct research on public health or how people behave online.
Rebekah Trumbull, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, used the Twitter API to track conversations on Twitter to see what kinds of tweets drew attacks from trolls — and what they got. In one study.
“With so little information from Twitter about the practicalities of this new policy, the specifics of it, we don’t know where to go. We have no way of planning. And for many of us who are out in the field, running programs, running projects that have real world consequences, it’s very scary,” she said.
Twitter was not alone, but unique among social media companies in making its API open and free. For example, TikTok is currently working on it but has not yet released its API. Facebook is more limited because the company is very protective of the data it collects.
Ms Tromble said social platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others were taking steps to increase researchers’ access and transparency – largely because of new European regulations. Twitter, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction. “They’ve gone completely from first grade to last,” she said.
It costs money to maintain the API. As a private company, Twitter is free to charge for its tools. But researchers and developers say it won’t take long for Ms. Musk to carve out exceptions for academic research and non-profits.
“No other technology has changed society so quickly and profoundly as social media. Having access to the thoughts and feelings of other people around the world is a fundamental change for society,” said Computer Science at the University of Southern California said Professor Christina Lerman, who studies misinformation. “And you can’t figure it out without access to the data, access to the observations.”
Takeshi Kawamoto, a Japanese software developer who runs a popular earthquake alert bot with more than three million followers, created the account in 2007 as a hobby.
There are an incredible number of bots like this on Twitter – useful, friendly or quirky accounts set up by people or groups with a specific interest. There are weather bots, tools that combine long Twitter threads into one easy-to-read file, bots that send quotes from famous books or people, bots that remind you to stand up and stretch at random intervals during the day , bots that insert a little chatter and weirdness into your Twitter scrolling.
Earthquake bot Kawamoto didn’t take off before the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that struck Japan in 2011, when people turned to it for information about earthquakes and aftershocks.
Kawamoto was ready to shut down the bot when Twitter first announced it was going to charge for API access. Paying $1,200 for an account that definitely isn’t making a profit just wasn’t possible. Last week, Twitter announced it would make a small exception to offer “write-only” API access for accounts that send fewer than 1,500 tweets a month.
This could help, but Kawamoto says a limit of 1,500 would present a problem after a large earthquake with lots of aftershocks. He wants to ask Mr. Musk to allow accounts to post no more than 1,500 tweets on a pay-as-you-go basis.
So far, San Francisco-based Twitter hasn’t offered any other exceptions, though it’s possible Mr Musk will see one of many tweets from developers working on earthquake relief pleading for a solution.
For Mark Sample and his small army of Twitter bots that send out carefully curated quotes from Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” at random intervals, it’s too late. The Moby Dick bot, as well as those who sent computer clip art from 1994 and were called “weird satellites”, have all left Twitter. Some have moved to Mastodon, the social platform that some discouraged Twitter users are migrating to.
Sample’s bots were part of “Weird Twitter”, a bizarre subculture of Twitter that peaked in the mid-2010s and consisted of weird, funny, nonsensical bots that sent bursts of randomness into people’s feeds.
“I’m kind of going through a grieving process,” said Sample, professor of digital studies at Davidson College in North Carolina. Which is like this open playground. I mean, there were ways that people could take advantage of it and twist things and use it in the wrong way. But it was also a great playground for hobbyists and creatives. No other social media platform had this. ,
For the sample, the breaking point was not the API declaration. it came out last fall when Mr. Musk started mass shooting twitter worker and going after reporters who questioned or criticized him, he said. Making apps for a platform when someone is completely off it, he said, is “not a good use of our time and creative energy.”
“I mean, it was a good run,” he said. “It’s 15 years or whatever. So it’s been a pretty good run. And maybe it’s time to do something else.