Writers trying to embed tweets in their Substack stories are in for a rude surprise: after pasting a link to the site, a message pops up saying that “Twitter has unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts” and explaining that the company is working on a fix.
As The Verge reports, after initial reports surfaced, between Thursday night and Friday morning, Twitter apparently began to restrict promotion and visibility for tweets with links to Substack posts. New tweets linking directly to Substack.com can still be tweeted, but trying to retweet or like those tweets via Twitter’s website results in an error message saying, “Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter,” while doing the same from within its apps or TweetDeck appears to work while failing silently.
The founders of Substack Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Seth, provided a statement to The Verge in response:
We’re disappointed that Twitter has chosen to restrict writers’ ability to share their work. Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else. This abrupt change is a reminder of why writers deserve a model that puts them in charge, that rewards great work with money, and that protects the free press and free speech. 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 fret — let’s give it another shot.” There are some new tweets linking to Substacks that don’t display this error, but it appears several authors have begun working around the issue by obscuring their links with redirect services like ShortURL to avoid the Twitter block.
Is it a coincidence that this situation came on the heels of Substack announcing Notes, a Twitter competitor?
There are no public statements on the issue 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 competitors, like Instagram, Facebook, and Mastodon. Before undoing the ban, Musk tweeted that “Twitter should be easy to use, but no more relentless free advertising of competitors. No traditional publisher allows this and neither will Twitter.”
The issue with embedding tweets in Substack posts could cause problems for writers who want to talk about what’s going on with Twitter in their newsletters or about things that are happening on the platform. While screenshots of tweets could work in some cases, they’re less trustworthy because they don’t provide a direct link to the source. Screenshots also won’t help you if you’re trying to, say, embed a video that someone posted on Twitter. (And Twitter seems to be at least somewhat interested in becoming a video platform, given that several Blue perks relate to making the video uploading experience better.)
Since the issue arose, various companies have been notifying users that they have to cut out or paywall certain features that interacted with Twitter, and many people who have run bots on the platform have been posting about how they can no longer post like they used to.
Buckenham told The Verge that the email was the only communication they’d received from Twitter about the suspension and that they hadn’t expected anything to change until the end of April based on the company’s statement that it’d be deprecating old accounts “over the next 30 days.” “I’ll confess I expected it to be a ratelimit, not the API key being revoked, though,” they said before adding, “But overall I’m not surprised to find Twitter’s changes rolling out unpredictably.”
Some developers have decried the new API plans as being prohibitively expensive. The “Basic” tier costs $100 a month and lets your app post a maximum of 50,000 tweets per month (with a 3,000 tweet per month limit per user) and read 10,000 tweets per month. There is a free tier, but it only lets you write tweets, not read them.
According to The Verge, the API transition has been bumpy, even for those that appear to be in Twitter’s good graces. Last week, WordPress’ API access was suspended, making it so users couldn’t auto-share posts to the platform. The company was eventually able to get it restored and says that it’ll be “working with Twitter directly to ensure this service keeps running without interruption.”
There are several tools that integrate Twitter that do still work. For example, embeds still work in Ghost, a blogging platform similar to Substack. However, if those tools rely on API access to work, it’s possible there could be problems ahead as Twitter continues to depreciate access to it.
None of this will necessarily be a surprise to those who remember how Twitter treated third-party clients. In January, the company silently cut off their API access before rewriting its rules to ban them almost a week later.
For someone who vowed to “restore free speech” on Twitter, Musk certainly has a funny way of showing it.
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