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.”
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Twitter’s Announcement Ending Free Access to Twitter API v2 and 1.1
Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have sent over a trillion Tweets, with billions more every week.
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) February 2, 2023
We have been busy with some updates to the Twitter API so you can continue to build and innovate with us.
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) February 8, 2023
We’re excited to announce an extension of the current free Twitter API access through February 13. Here’s what we’re shipping then 🧵
A new form of free access will be introduced as this is extremely important to our ecosystem – limited to Tweet creation of up to 1,500 Tweets per month for a single authenticated user token, including Login with Twitter.
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) February 8, 2023
What Will Break With The End of The 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.
