On 2nd February 2023 Twitter announced “Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead”. No indication of pricing was announced but Elon Musk tweeted later the same day “Yeah, free API is being abused badly right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators. There’s no verification process or cost, so easy to spin up 100k bots to do bad things. Just ~$100/month for API access with ID verification will clean things up greatly.”
Analysis of the “source” field from recent tweets of British train operating companies has revealed that most of these companies regularly use third party apps, which rely upon the Twitter API to function. This source data previously used to be publicly displayed on all Tweets, to show the application which authored the tweet, e.g. “Twitter for iPhone” or “Tweetdeck”, but this information was concealed recently by Twitter and can be accessed by using the Twitter API to see the meta information for specific tweets.
A wide variety of third party apps were found to be the source of the train company’s tweets, including:
Coosto, Orlo, Emplifi, Qualtrics Social Connect, Verint Messaging, SoCrowd, Hootsuite and Sprinklr Publishing.
All these companies, which are dependent upon the success of huge social media companies, have always faced so-called “Platform risk”. This risk arises when a business is built on top of an existing platform or platforms to leverage on its existing services and users.
Clearly, although these companies already probably charge for using their services to post tweets (their prices are often unclear or invisible on their websites), an exclusively paid Twitter API will have dramatic implications for their business model and profitability. Surely they will need to increase their prices, especially if Twitter charges for usage per request. Only a few of the train operating companies that were analysed were found to be using the native Twitter Web App to post tweets.
Railway companies that relied upon third party apps that use the Twitter API for communicating with their customers, accessing and analysing data, automating their social media activities, or integrating Twitter functionalities into their products will be affected if they lose access to the API via these apps. Without access to the API, they may face difficulties in obtaining data insights, executing effective social media campaigns, and delivering seamless user experiences. The extent of the impact would depend on how heavily a company relied on the Twitter API and how quickly they can find alternative solutions.
Railway companies will continue to be able to use the native Twitter web and native mobile applications to communicate with their customers. How this news from Twitter will impact them will depend upon the third party platform that they use and how they respond to this change. Third party platforms such as Orlo could have to hugely increase their prices overnight to maintain service and avoid insolvency.
It’s well worth anyone working in the customer services in the railway industry, or indeed anyone who uses Twitter for their source of reliable railway information, to be aware of these Twitter API changes. It seems that if these changes go ahead, considering the reliance of the British Train Operating Companies upon the Twitter API to efficiently distribute information, there is potential for communications disruption ahead.