Musk Axes Free Twitter API – Millions of WordPress Users May Be Cut Off

Twitter API

Elon Musk is pulling the rug out from under millions of blog users who share their content with their Twitter user base each day. Twitter announced the end of the free Twitter API effective February 13, 2023. In a brief announcement, Automattic, Inc., the owners of WordPress and Jetpack, noted:

“Twitter recently announced they would end free access to the Twitter API on February 9th. A recent update extended that date to February 13th. As a result of these unexpected changes, it is possible that Jetpack Social may experience some temporary outages when automatically sharing your posts directly from WordPress to Twitter.”

Twitter’s Announcement Ending Free Access to Twitter API v2 and 1.1

What Will Break With The End of The Free Twitter API

Earthquake - Free Twitter API

The typical use case that may be impacted by the end of the free Twitter API is that WordPress authors and publishers will not be able to share their latest posts to the Twitter platform automatically. Services such as Jetpack and many WordPress plug-ins depend on the free Twitter API to read and update when content is published.

Other Applications Impacted By The End of Free Twitter API

Researchers – Academic researchers and students rely on the free API to monitor tweets and make queries covering social and political issues. The loss of this access will effectively curtail any monitoring and reporting on societal trends from Twitter.

Weather, News, and Earthquake Reporting – Bots passing information about significant weather, news and earthquake warnings will likely be impacted by losing their unlimited ability to post.

The End of Single Sign-On (SSO) – If you use Twitter credentials to sign into another website, the announced end of the free Twitter API may prevent you from accessing any website that uses SSO with Twitter. This may affect 1000s of enterprise marking sites that utilize SSO that accepts Twitter credentials.

Services That Delete Old Tweets – February 13th could be a bad day for applications like TweetDelete, TwitWipe, TweetDeleter, or other similar services.

Things Are Not Going Well At Twitter

News reports hint that Twitter may have lost half its top 1,000 advertising clients. The change to only offer verified accounts for those paying a subscription fee so far has only netted about 180,000 subscribers in the US. It is getting so bad that there are reports of Elon Musk firing a software engineer who delivered the bad news about Elon’s own account’s engagement despite having over 100 million followers.

This news is symptomatic of problems at the core of Twitter’s current business model. The social media network was once a $4.5 billion advertising generator used by the top Fortune 1000 in the world. However, after Musk completed the takeover of the company last October, advertising clients became concerned about the operational stability of the platform.

Michael Hardy

Michael is the owner of Thumbwind Publications LLC. Thumbwind strives to offer small business owners the ability to expand their voice on the Internet and establish an online presence.

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