Earlier this week, Facebook announced to deprecate its ‘Publish’ actions permissions from its API, a feature that made it possible for apps to publish posts to Facebook as the logged-in user.
Facebook expected roughly 60,000 apps will be impacted — one of which is Twitter. Twitter users are no longer able to tweet and retweet automatically on their connected Facebook accounts.
Twitter’s support team tweeted the following message to users not long after Facebook had removed access to the Publish actions permissions feature:
“We’ve learned that Tweets and Retweets will no longer automatically post to connected Facebook accounts due to a recent Facebook update,” Twitter tweeted via their official support page.
"Don't worry, you have other ways to share a Tweet," it added.
Earlier, Facebook’s Vice President of Product Partnerships Ime Archibong said that all apps using the Facebook Platform APIs would need to go through a more comprehensive review to better protect people's Facebook information.
The deadline to submit for review for all existing apps was August 1.
"As a result, we are cutting off API access for hundreds of thousands of inactive apps that have not submitted for our app review process," said Archibong.
According to Facebook, anyone wanting to have Twitter content automatically post to Facebook has the option to use Facebook’s Share dialogs for web, iOS and Android.
In a move to clean itself, Twitter between April and June 2018 removed over 143,000 apps that produced spam, manipulated conversations, or invaded the privacy of people using the platform.
Twitter’s purge of bad apps comes after the social media giant Facebook’s Cambridge Anlaytica scandal. Facebook faced strong criticism from lawmakers on the grounds that it failed to prevent an academic researcher from creating an app on its platform that harvested data of about 87 million users, which was later sold to a political consulting firm that used allegedly used the data to influence the 2016 US presidential election.
Twitter, like Facebook and Google’s YouTube service, has also come under investigation for failing to prevent Russian propaganda outfits from creating accounts on its service and spreading misinformation prior to the US presidential election.
“We removed more than 143,000 apps which violated our policies, and we’re continuing to invest in building out improved tools and processes to help us stop malicious apps faster and more efficiently. To this end, in addition to continuing our work to remove problematic apps after they're already active, we are taking steps to limit the access these apps have to our platform in the first place,” the company said in a blog post.
Twitter also announced a new way for all developers to request access to Twitter’s APIs, along with upcoming changes to increase accountability for apps creating and engaging with content and accounts on Twitter at high volumes. According to Twitter, these changes will help the company to have more visibility and control over how developers use the platform and public data from the people using service.
Further, anyone who wants access to Twitter’s APIs should apply for a developer account using the new developer portal at developer.twitter.com. Once your application will be approved, you’ll be able to create new apps and manage existing apps on developer.twitter.com. Existing apps can also still be managed on apps.twitter.com.
“All developers with existing access to our APIs will be required to complete a developer account application in order to maintain their apps. We will provide at least a 90-day notice before enforcing this requirement. We may opt to retire apps.twitter.com before enforcing that requirement; in that case, we will ensure developers have access to manage their apps on developer.twitter.com, even if they have not yet started the application process,” the company added.
Twitter has also limited the default number of apps you may have registered by a single developer account to 10. Developers who need to register more than 10 apps can request permission using the API Policy support form.
For POST endpoints, Twitter has introduced a new default app-level rate limits that will cut down the ability of bad actors to create spam on Twitter via APIs. These changes will only impact a small percentage of apps active in Twitter’s ecosystem today, but will apply to all apps that create Tweets, Retweets, likes, follows, or Direct Messages.
Starting September 10, by default, an app (across all of its users) will be limited to:
- Tweets & Retweets (combined): 300 per 3 hours
- Likes: 1000 per 24 hours
- Follows: 1000 per 24 hours
- Direct Messages: 15,000 per 24 hours
“Finally, we have also introducing a new option for people to report suspected violations of our platform policies to us for review. You can use the ‘Report a bad app’ option in our Help Centre to report uses of our APIs which produce spam, invade user privacy, or otherwise violate our rules,” the company said.
