As for why, the comms team has yet to produce an answer
Twitter stands as one of the smaller major social networks that punches above its weight in terms of sheer influence. For those who’d like to track that influence down to specific numbers, third-party clients created with Twitter’s own API have filled the gaps that couldn’t be filled by the original app. Last week, however, it appeared as though the company shut down access to its API, effectively making all those clients useless. There’s been suspicion as to causality, but it seems now we have actually found some reason to believe Twitter made this happen.
The Information has obtained Slack communications from within Twitter which called the third-party app suspensions “intentional” and that the comms team had started working on “approved talking points” about the decision as of Friday morning. We have not seen any public communications about the matter from Twitter’s official channels as of this morning.
The Elon Musk-owned platform does have incentive to keep as many eyeballs on its platform as it can as it tries to ply more ads onto feeds to keep the lights on. The company also made view counts on tweets publicly visible on the app — something Paul Stamatiou, a former designer at Twitter, had a hand in testing years ago, but ultimately found fruitless for actual engagement.
While ad buyers on the platform presumably still have some access as to how their campaigns are doing, it’ll be interesting to see how other businesses that use third-party clients might cope as those programs brought in a bunch of key data points that made gathering tweets for a variety of purposes much easier.
