The Earthquakes and Twitter API

Thousands of volunteer software developers have been utilizing a crucial Twitter tool to search the platform for calls for help from people trapped in collapsed buildings, among other things, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria. However, they may soon lose access unless they pay Twitter a monthly fee of at least $100, which is too expensive for many volunteers and non-profit organizations on tight budgets.

Many groups rely on the tool, called the API (Application Programming Interface), to analyze Twitter data, which is impossible to do by hand due to the vast amount of information. Turkish developers working with Twitter API for disaster monitoring are particularly concerned about the new fees, and researchers who have been using the API for years to study misinformation, hate speech, public health, and people's online behavior are also worried. Since Elon Musk took over, communicating with anyone at the company has become nearly impossible, and the paywall is Musk's latest attempt to squeeze revenue out of Twitter. Some hope that Musk can make an exception for academic research and non-profit organizations.

Twitter had planned to introduce the changes last week but delayed it until Monday, and then delayed it again without providing further details. Social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are taking steps to increase transparency and access for researchers, but Twitter is moving in the opposite direction. Maintaining an API costs money, and as a private company, Twitter is free to charge for its tools, but researchers and developers argue that it would not take much for Musk to make exceptions for academic research and non-profit organizations. Twitter has announced that it will offer free "write-only" API access to accounts that send fewer than 1,500 tweets a month, which could help some groups, but others remain concerned.

In 2007, Takeshi Kawamoto, a Japanese software developer, created a popular earthquake alert bot on Twitter as a hobby, which now has over 3 million followers. Twitter has a vast array of bots, from weather bots to ones that send quotes from famous books or remind you to stretch during the day. However, the earthquake bot only gained momentum after the devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan, where people used it to obtain information about quakes and aftershocks.

Kawamoto considered shutting down the bot after Twitter announced that it would charge $1,200 per year for API access, which was not viable for an account that was not generating profits. Recently, Twitter announced a small exception by providing free "write-only" API access for accounts that send fewer than 1,500 tweets per month, but Kawamoto believes this limit may pose a problem after a significant earthquake with many aftershocks. He wishes to request that Twitter CEO Elon Musk allows accounts to post more than 1,500 tweets on a pay-as-you-go basis.

While developers working on earthquake relief have been pleading for a solution, Twitter has not offered any other exceptions. As a result, some Twitter bots, such as Mark Sample's, have left the platform, with some moving to Mastodon, a social media platform that some discouraged Twitter users have migrated to. Sample's bots were part of "weird Twitter," a subculture that peaked in the mid-2010s, where quirky bots sent bursts of randomness into people's feeds. Sample, a digital studies professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, mourns the loss of the API, which was Twitter's unique feature that provided an open playground for hobbyists and creative people. However, his breaking point was not the API announcement, but when Musk began mass-firing Twitter workers and going after journalists who criticized him last fall. He believes that building apps for a platform that can be shut down at any time is not a good use of time and creative energy, and it may be time for something else.