Writers trying to include tweets in their Substack Stories are in for a rude surprise: After pasting a link to the site, a message appears that “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embed tweets in Substack posts” and makes it clear that the company is working on a fix.
After these reports emerged, between Thursday night and Friday morning, it appears that Twitter began restricting promotion and visibility to Tweets containing links to Substack posts. New tweets linked directly to Substack.com It’s still possible to Tweet, but trying to Retweet or Like those Tweets via the Twitter site results in an error message that says, “Some action in this Tweet has been disabled by Twitter,” while doing the same from within their apps or TweetDeck seems to run while failing silently .
Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Seth have provided the following statement to the edge In reply:
We are disappointed that Twitter chose to limit writers’ ability to share their work. Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or elsewhere. This sudden change is a reminder of why writers deserve a model that puts them in charge, rewards great work with money, and protects freedom of the press and freedom of expression. Their livelihoods should not be tied to platforms where they don’t own their relationship with their audience, and where the rules can change on a whim.
Trying to reply to a tweet with a Substack link causes a different error, which reads, “Something went wrong, but don’t worry – let’s take another look at it.” There are some new tweets we’ve found linked to Substacks that don’t show this error, but several authors seem to be starting to work around the problem by hiding their links to redirect services like ShortURL to avoid Twitter being banned.
The unfortunate situation comes on the heels of Substack’s announcement of Notes, a competitor to Twitter.
There are no public statements on this issue from Twitter or its owner/CEO Elon Musk; However, it is a reminder of the day in mid-December when Twitter temporarily blocked links to all competitors, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Mastodon. Before retracting the ban, Musk chirp that “Twitter should be easy to use, but no more relentless free advertising for competitors. No traditional publisher allows that as well as Twitter.”
The issue of embedding tweets in Substack posts can cause problems for writers who want to talk about what’s going on with Twitter in their newsletters or about things that happen on the platform. While screenshots of tweets can work in some cases, they are less trustworthy because they do not provide a direct link to the source. Screenshots won’t help you either if you’re trying to, say, embed a video someone posted on Twitter. (And Twitter seems to be at least somewhat interested in becoming a video platform, since many of the blue perks are about improving the video upload experience.)
As an example of how useful embed tweets can be, here’s Substack’s official announcement of its issue research:
When asked by Substack spokeswoman Helen Tobin on Thursday whether the issues with tweet embeds were caused by changes to the Twitter API, she didn’t comment and instead shared the same statement the company tweeted. If so, it will be far from the only platform affected by Twitter’s new API policies, which were announced a week ago.
Since then, many companies have notified users that they have to do without or Certain paywall features that interacted with Twitter, and several people who ran bots on the platform were posting about how they could no longer post like they used to. Here are some of the jailbroken apps and bots:
- Feedbin Developer It was said that the app “violated Twitter’s laws and policies” by allowing people to access tweets in their RSS reader. Another RSS app, Inoreader, I received the same message.
- TweetShift, a bot on Discord that lets you interact with Twitter via a chat app, says was “Randomly suspended from Twitter API” on Wednesday.
- TweeseCake and TWBlue, apps aimed at creating Twitter Easier to use for blind userswe are no longer works (at least on some platforms).
- Many new bots, such as sex today And Possum every hourwarn users that they may no longer be able to continue posting.
- Inexpensive robotics tool, done quickly Suspended from Twitter API, with its developer, V Buckenham, being told in an email to sign up for one of the company’s new API layers. This will almost certainly bring down other bots that have been built with the tool.
Pakenham said the edge that the email was the only communication they had from Twitter about the suspension and that they did not expect anything to change until the end of April based on Company statement Old accounts will be suspended “within the next 30 days”. “I’ll admit I was expecting it to be minimal, not a revoked API key, though,” they said before adding, “but I’m generally not surprised to find Twitter changes are being rolled out unexpectedly.”
Some developers have decried the new API plans as being too expensive. The Basic tier costs $100 per month and allows your app to post a maximum of 50,000 Tweets per month (with a maximum of 3,000 Tweets per month per user) and read 10,000 Tweets per month. There is a free category, but it just lets you He writes Tweets, don’t read them. It wouldn’t be useful, for example, Thread reader bot This makes it easier to read the threads of posts on the site.
The API transition has been bumpy, even for those who seem to be in good graces on Twitter. earlier this week, WordPress API access suspended, which makes it impossible for users to automatically post posts to the platform. The company was eventually able to restore it It says it will work with Twitter directly to ensure that the service continues to run without interruption.
There are many tools that integrate Twitter that Do He’s still working. Embeds still works in Ghost, a blogging platform similar to Substack, as well as in the edgeCMS (obviously). However, if these tools depend on API access to work, there will likely be problems in the future as Twitter continues to neglect access.
None of this will necessarily come as a surprise to those who remember how Twitter handled third-party clients. In January, the company silently cut off access to the API before rewriting its rules to block it about a week later.
Update 10:50 a.m. ET: Added details about Substack links blocking Twitter as well as workarounds.
11:26 a.m. ET update: Added response from Substack co-founders.
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