Pulling the rug out from under developers may seem to be the least of Elon Musk’s once-unthinkable moves since taking over Twitter. Twitter declared that it will no longer enable any developer to utilise its APIs for free after abruptly banning third-party clients.
Twitter has said little about the changes so far, other than confirming a February 9th cut-off date. Musk has hinted that Twitter may charge $100 per month “with ID verification,” but has not provided any details. We do know that if free access is discontinued, hundreds of applications, research projects, bots, and other services would cease to operate (or, at the very least, be interrupted). If you use Twitter, chances are you’ll be affected in some manner, and you shouldn’t put it off until it’s too late.
Modify your login information for applications where you’ve logged in using Twitter.
If you’ve ever signed into another service using your Twitter credentials, the upcoming API shutdown may prohibit you from accessing your account. It means you should double-check whatever services you’ve used Twitter to login to, and alter your account information while you can.
Settings -> Security and Account Access -> Apps and Sessions -> Connected Apps allows you to see which services have access to your Twitter account (or, clicking here). Depending on the service, you may need to establish a new account with new credentials.
Nuke your tweets
There are several reasons to remove old tweets. Yet, if you haven’t already, the window of opportunity to do so is swiftly closing. TweetDelete, TwitWipe, TweetDeleter, or any similar tool may let you delete your tweet history. There are a few subscription-based tweet-deleting services available. It may be prudent to postpone utilising a premium service until it is obvious if any of these applications will continue to run once the API changes take effect.
Mastodon is a great place to find mutuals.
Regardless of your Fediverse experience, now would be a great moment to locate all of your Twitter mutuals on Mastodon. Movetodon and Twitodon allow you to quickly discover recognised Mastodon accounts. Constructing your following graph on a new platform may be one of the most difficult aspects of getting started, so even if you’re not sure about moving, it’s not a terrible idea to take use of these tools while you still can.
Other than that
However, the consequences of removing the open API will be far broader than simply these applications. Twitter’s bots — the automated accounts that publish anything from weather updates to useful reminders, jokes, and emergency warnings — face an unclear future. Although Musk has stated that certain bots providing “excellent” content may be allowed to use the Twitter API for free, it’s unclear how this would operate or if paying for Twitter Blue will be required. So far, a number of bot creators have said that they would not pay for the usage of Twitter’s API and that their accounts will be deactivated on September 9th.
The API changes will be bad for the research community as well. Nowadays, hundreds of journalists, organisations, and academic institutions utilise Twitter’s API to investigate disinformation, public health, education, and a variety of other concerns. Forcing these researchers to pay might essentially put a stop to these programmes, especially for smaller and less well-funded institutes. For the time being, it is unclear if these groups will have any other choices.
