Writers trying to embed tweets in their substack stories are in for a nasty surprise: After pasting a link to the site, a message appears stating that “Twitter has blocked access to embedding tweets in substack posts unexpectedly restricted” and states that the company is working towards a solution.
After those reports surfaced, Twitter apparently began restricting the promotion and visibility of tweets linking to substack posts between Thursday night and Friday morning. New tweets that link directly to Substack.com can still be tweeted, but attempting to retweet or like those tweets through Twitter’s site will result in an error message stating, “Some actions on this tweet were taken by Twitter disabled” while doing the same from within its apps or TweetDeck seem to work while failing in the background.
The Twitter error message that appears when you try to interact with a tweet that contains a link to Substack. Image: Twitter/The Verge
Attempting to reply to a tweet with a substack link results in another error which reads “Something went wrong, but don’t worry – let’s try again.” We found some new tweets pointing to Link substacks that don’t show this error, but apparently several authors have started to work around the problem by obfuscating their links with redirection services like ShortURL to bypass the Twitter ban.
The unfortunate situation follows the announcement of Substack Notes, a Twitter competitor.
There have been no public statements on the matter from Twitter or its owner/CEO Elon Musk; However, it’s a reminder of the day in mid-December when Twitter temporarily blocked links to all its competitors, including Instagram, Facebook, and Mastodon. Before you reverse the ban, Musk tweeted that “Twitter should be easy to use, but no more merciless free advertising from the competition. No traditional publisher allows this, and neither will Twitter.”
The issue with embedding tweets in substack posts could cause problems for writers wanting to talk in their newsletters or what’s going on with Twitter about things happening on the platform. While screenshots of tweets might work in some cases, they’re less trustworthy because they don’t provide a direct link to the source. Screenshots won’t help you either, for example, if you’re trying to embed a video that someone posted on Twitter. (And Twitter seems at least a little interested in becoming a video platform, as several blue benefits relate to improving the video uploading experience.)
As an example of how useful embedding tweets can be, here’s Substack’s official announcement that it’s addressing the issues:
When I asked Substack spokeswoman Helen Tobin on Thursday if the tweet embedding issues were caused by changes to the Twitter API, she didn’t comment, instead sharing the same statement tweeted by the company. If that’s the case, however, it would be far from the only platform affected by Twitter’s new API policies, which were announced a week ago.
Since then, various companies have notified users that they must turn off or pay for certain features that interacted with Twitter, and many people who ran bots on the platform have posted about not being able to post like they used to. Here are some of the apps and bots that broke:
- Feedbin’s developer was told that the app had “violated Twitter rules and policies” by allowing users to access tweets in their RSS reader. Another RSS app, Inoreader, got the same message.
- TweetShift, a Discord bot that lets you interact with Twitter through the chat app, says it was “accidentally suspended from the Twitter API” on Wednesday.
- TweeseCake and TWBlue, apps designed to make Twitter easier to use for blind usersAre no longer works (at least on some platforms).
- Several novelty bots, such as gender of the day And Possum every hourhave warned users that they may not be able to continue posting.
- Botmaking tool Cheap bots, made quickly banned from Twitter API, whose developer V Buckenham received an email asking them to sign up for one of the company’s new API tiers. This will almost certainly bring down other bots built with the tool.
Buckenham told The Verge that the email was the only communication they had received from Twitter about the suspension and that they didn’t expect anything to change by the end of April the statement of the company that it would discard old accounts “in the next 30 days”. “I’ll admit I was expecting it to be rate limiting, not API key revocation,” they said, before adding, “but overall I’m not surprised that Twitter’s unpredictably introduced changes.” become.”
Some developers have called the new API plans prohibitive. The Basic tier costs $100 per month and lets your app post a maximum of 50,000 tweets per month (with a limit of 3,000 tweets per month per user) and read 10,000 tweets per month. There is a free tier, but it only lets you write tweets, not read them. That would not be useful for, say, the Thread Reader bot This makes the strings of posts on the site easier to read.
The API transition has been a bumpy one, even for those who appear to be in Twitter’s good graces. Earlier this week, WordPress suspended API access, preventing users from automatically sharing posts on the platform. The company was eventually able to restore it and says it will “work directly with Twitter to ensure this service continues uninterrupted.”
There are several tools that integrate with Twitter that still work. Embeds still work in Ghost, a Substack-like blogging platform, as well as (obviously) The Verge’s content management system. However, when these tools rely on API access to work, problems can arise as Twitter continues to devalue access to them.
None of this will surprise those who remember how Twitter treated third-party customers. In January, the company quietly paused its API access before rewriting its rules to ban them nearly a week later.
Update 10:50am ET: Added details on Twitter blocking substack links and workarounds.