Vera Bergenguren from TIME magazine talked about the devoted work of the 22,000-person software developer and data analyst community founded by Turkish software developers from all over the world after the Kahramanmaraş earthquake and how Twitter APIs prevented these efforts.
From the first day of the Kahramanmaraş earthquake, we saw the importance of the social media platform Twitter as the whole world. Citizens who were affected by the earthquake and could not reach the authorities made their calls for help on Twitter.
Thousands of people who received these calls for help organized aid and directed them to the disaster area. The vast majority of aid comes from all over the world. A community of 22 thousand people founded by Turkish software developers Organized by applications developed by
TIME magazine talked about the devoted work of 22 thousand Turkish software developers.
TIME editor Vera Bergengruen, who reached Hakan Özalp from a software developer and data analysis community consisting of 22 thousand volunteers, conveyed the details of the work done. The 22,000-strong team collected tweets via geotagging and hashtags, confirmed calls for help and a report showing where survivors’ calls for help came from. created a heatmap.
completed data, shared with rescue teams in the area and people’s lives began to be saved in this way.
However, this selfless work has been made difficult when it might have been easy due to Twitter’s API changes.
We talked about how calls for help from Twitter work in such natural disaster situations. According to Turkish data scientists Bergengruen reached APIs that enable third parties to access and use data on Twitter are vital in this regard.
However, as you may remember, the Twitter API has changed over the past month and is owned by third parties. Access to API was restricted. This slowed down the process of these volunteer programmers collecting data and transferring the application.
The problem is not only in the API, but the layoffs of Elon Musk after he took over the company also caused a big problem.
After Elon Musk officially took over Twitter in October, he laid off almost 80% of the employees. Since the layoffs, developers who provide information benefited by academics, journalists and NGOs through APIs due to slow data flow. they are complaining.
Connecting developers to Twitter’s engineering teams help portals after these layoffs disabled. So an important link was broken.
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Other people Bergengruen reaches also talk about how critical Twitter has been in such disaster situations, and He states that the ban on Twitter also undermines aid activities..
There has been no statement from Elon Musk or the Twitter team about APIs yet, we will share it with you as soon as it arrives. If you wish, you can read Vera Bergengruen’s article published in TIME magazine here.