From the first day of the earthquake in Kahramanmaraş, we saw the importance of the social media platform Twitter as the whole world. Civilians affected by the quake and unable to reach authorities took to Twitter to cry for help.

Thousands of people who received these calls for help organized aid and sent 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 spoke about the dedicated work of 22 thousand Turkish software developers.

Reaching out to Hakan Özalp from a community of software developers and data analysis made up of 22,000 volunteers, TIME editor Vera Bergengruen relayed the details of the work done. The 22,000-strong team collected tweets via geotagging and hashtags, confirmed calls for help and a map showing where the survivors’ call for help came from. created a heat map.

data entered, shared with rescue teams in the area and in this way human lives began to be saved.

However, this selfless work has been made difficult when it could 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 APIs that enable third parties to access and use data on Twitter are vital in this regard.

As you may recall, the Twitter API has changed in the past month and is owned by third parties. Access to API was limited. This slowed down the process of these volunteer programmers collecting data and handing over the application.

The problem is not only in the API, the firings of Elon Musk after he took over the company also caused a major problem.

After Elon Musk officially took over Twitter in October, he laid off nearly 80% of its employees. Since the layoffs, developers who provide information through APIs have benefited academics, journalists and NGOs due to slow data flow. they complain.

Connecting developers with Twitter’s technical teams portals help after these layoffs handicapped. So an important link was broken.

Other people Bergengruen reaches also talk about how critical Twitter has been in such disaster situations, and He argues that the ban on Twitter also undermines aid activities..

There’s no statement yet from Elon Musk or the Twitter team on APIs, we’ll share it with you as it comes in. If you want, you can read Vera Bergengruen’s article in TIME magazine here.