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Twitter says third-party apps have broken “long-standing API rules,” not calling rules

    Two fighting birds on a tree branch
    Enlarge / Two birds enforce longstanding bird feeder access rules. That can lead to some birds not eating.

    Tony Quinn/EyeEm/Getty Images

    Since Twitter revoked API access from prominent third-party customers, developers, dedicated fans, and tech experts have been waiting for an explanation. They still haven’t received one yet a recent tweet from Twitter’s API team suggests it’s all the developers’ fault for breaking “long-standing API rules” that the company won’t name.

    The Twitter Dev account says the social network “enforces” those rules, and that it “may cause some apps to not work.” from Twitter API documentation is extensive and contains many rules and limits that depend on multiple factors. Tech video producer Marques Brownlee, who has 6 million followers, replied to the account shortly after the post, asking: “What are the rulesNeither Brownlee’s questions nor any other questions elicited an answer.

    No one outside of Twitter can say if the company was looking for a reason to ban third-party clients and found it in its API language or if the company suddenly decided to enforce API rules against some of the most popular third-party clients, just like the company sought to bolster its earnings against a significant drop in advertising revenue and pending debt payments. (Third-party clients typically don’t show Twitter’s “promoted” tweet ads.) A timeline of Musk’s Twitter property, recently published by The Verge and New York Magazine, noted that the entire API team at Amir Shevat was wiped out in a layoff in early November.

    Internal chats recently seen by tech news site The Information (subscription required) last week showed a senior software engineer stating that “third party app suspensions are intentional”. Third-party app developers who changed their API keys for those who were severely restricted found their access revoked quickly. Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad posted on Mastodon that the swift re-ban proved that the bans were “intentional” and that “we and others [third-party client apps] were specifically targeted.”

    Twitter has redefined and limited its API many times before, but before Musk took ownership, the changes were communicated in advance, with plenty of time for developers to change or, as often happened, file public complaints. Twitter’s Dev team suggests the rules were already in place this time around, but it has no comment on what they could be.