Writers trying to embed tweets in their Substack stories are in for a rude surprise: after pasting a link to the site, a message appears saying “Twitter has been unexpectedly restricted access to embedding tweets in Substack posts” and explains that the company is working on a fix.
After those reports surfaced, between Thursday night and Friday morning, Twitter apparently began restricting promotion and visibility for tweets with links to Substack’s posts. New tweets linking directly to Substack.com can still be tweeted, but trying to retweet or like those tweets through the Twitter website results in an error message that says, “Some actions in this Tweet are not enabled by Twitter,” while doing the same from within its apps or TweetDeck seems to work while failing silently.
Substack founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Seth, gave the following statement on The Verge in response:
We are disappointed that Twitter has chosen to restrict writers’ ability to share their work. Writers deserve the freedom to share links on Substack or elsewhere. This sudden change is a reminder of why writers deserve a model that puts them in charge, that rewards good work with money, and that protects the free press and free speech. Their livelihoods shouldn’t 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 throws up a different error, saying, “Something went wrong, but don’t worry — let’s try it.” There are a few new tweets we’ve seen that link to Substacks that don’t show this error, but it appears that many authors have started to work around the issue by obfuscating their links with encryption services. redirect like ShortURL to avoid Twitter blocking.
The unfortunate situation comes on the heels of Substack announcing Notes, a Twitter competitor.
There has been no public statement 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, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Mastodon. Before undoing the ban, Musk tweeted that “Twitter should be easy to use, but no more non-stop free advertising by competitors. No traditional publisher allows this and Twitter won’t either.”
The issue with embedding tweets in Substack posts can cause problems for writers who want to talk about what’s happening on Twitter in their newsletters or about things happening on the platform. While screenshots of tweets can work in some situations, they are less reliable 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 someone posted on Twitter. (And Twitter seems quite interested in becoming a video platform, as many Blue perks are tied 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 looking into the issues:
When I asked Substack spokeswoman Helen Tobin on Thursday about whether the issues with embedding tweets were caused by Twitter’s API changes, she didn’t comment and instead shared the same statement that has been- the company tweeted. If they are, however, it’s far from the only platform affected by Twitter’s new API policies, announced a week ago.
Since then, various companies have been notifying users that they need to cut or paywall some features who contacted Twitter, and many people who ran bots on the platform were posting about how they couldn’t post like they used to. Here are some of the apps and bots that were broken:
- Developer of Feedbin was told that the app “violated Twitter’s Rules and policies” by allowing people 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, said then “Randomly suspended from the Twitter API” on Wednesday.
- TweeseCake and TWBlue, apps meant to create Twitter easier to use for blind usersis no longer works (at least on some platforms).
- There are many new bots, such as gender of the sun and Possum Every Houris warning users that they may not be able to continue posting.
- Botmaking tool Cheap Bots, Fast Done suspended from the Twitter API, with its developer, V Buckenham, told in an email 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 said The Verge that the email was the only communication they received from Twitter about the suspension and that they don’t expect anything to change until the end of April based on company statement that it will no longer use the old accounts “for the next 30 days.” “I’ll admit I expected it to be a ratelimit, not the API key being revoked,” they said before adding, “But overall, I’m not surprised to see Twitter’s changes unfold so unpredictably.”
Some developers have criticized the new API plans as being too expensive. The “Basic” tier costs $100 a 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 to write tweets, not read them. That wouldn’t be useful for, say, the Thread Reader bot which makes it easier to read strings of posts on the site.
The API transition was bumpy, even for those who seemed to be in Twitter’s good graces. Earlier this week, Access to the WordPress API has been suspended, making it impossible for users to auto-share posts on the platform. The company was eventually it will be returned and says it is “working directly with Twitter to ensure this service continues to run without interruption.”
There are several tools that integrate Twitter already do still work. Embeds still work in Ghost, a blogging platform similar to Substack, as well as in The Vergecontent management system by (obviously). However, if those tools rely on API access to work, there could potentially be problems in the future as Twitter continues to reduce access to it.
None of this should come as a surprise to those who remember how Twitter treats third-party clients. In January, the company quietly cut off their access to the API before rewriting its rules to ban them about a week later.
Update 10:50AM ET: Added Twitter blocking details to Substack links as well as workarounds.
Update 11:26AM ET: Added a response from the founders of Substack.