Tag: earthquake in turkey

Twitter’s plan to charge for crucial API tool prompts outcry

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In the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, thousands of volunteer software developers have been using a crucial Twitter tool to comb the platform for calls for help — including from people trapped in collapsed buildings — and connect people with rescue organisations.

They could soon lose access unless they pay Twitter a monthly fee of at least $100 — prohibitive for many volunteers and non-profits on shoestring budgets.

Explained | Why were the Turkey earthquakes so deadly?

“That’s not just for rescue efforts which unfortunately we’re coming to the end of, but for logistics planning too as people go to Twitter to broadcast their needs,” said Sedat Kapanoglu, the founder of Eksi Sozluk, Turkey’s most popular social platform, who has been advising some of the volunteers in their efforts.

Non-profits, researchers and others need the tool, known as the API, or Application Programming Interface, to analyse Twitter data because the sheer amount of information makes it impossible for a human to go through by hand.

Mr. Kapanoglu says hundreds of “good Samaritans” have been giving out their own, premium paid API access keys (Twitter already offered a paid version with more features) for use in the rescue efforts. But he says this isn’t “sustainable or the right way” to do this. It might even be against Twitter’s rules.

The loss of free API access means an added challenge for the thousands of developers in Turkey and beyond who are working around the clock to harness Twitter’s unique, open ecosystem for disaster relief.

“For Turkish coders working with Twitter API for disaster monitoring purposes, this is particularly worrying — and I’d imagine it is similarly worrying for others around the world that are using Twitter data to monitor emergencies and politically contested events,” said Akin Unver, a professor of international relations at Ozyegin University in Istanbul.

The new fees are just the latest complication for programmers, academics and others trying to use the API — and they say communicating with anyone at the company has become essentially impossible since Elon Musk took over.

Twitter had originally planned to introduce the changes last week, but delayed it until February 13. On Monday, the company tweeted that it was delaying the launch again “by a few more days,” without providing more details.

The API paywall is Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to squeeze revenue out of Twitter, which is on the hook for about $1 billion in yearly interest payments from the billionaire’s acquisition, completed in October.

It’s not just disaster relief groups that are concerned. Academic and non-governmental researchers for years have used Twitter to study the spread of misinformation and hate speech or research public health or how people behave online.

Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University, used the Twitter API to track conversations on Twitter to see what kinds of tweets elicited attacks from trolls — and what got them to go away — in one study.

“With so little information from Twitter about the practicalities of this new policy, the specifics of it, we just don’t know where to go. We have no way to do the planning. And for many of us who are in the field, running programmes, running projects that have real world consequences, that’s pretty scary,” she said.

Twitter wasn’t alone but was unique among social media companies in making its API open and free. TikTok, for instance, is working on it now but so far has not released its API. Facebook’s is more limited because the company is very protective of the data it collects.

Ms. Tromble said social platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and others are taking steps to increase researcher access and transparency — largely due to new European regulations. Twitter, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction. “They’ve gone from first in class to absolute dead last,” she said.

It costs money to maintain an API. As a private company, Twitter is free to charge for its tools. But researchers and developers say it wouldn’t take much for Ms. Musk to carve out exceptions for academic research and non-profits.

“No other technology has changed society as quickly and as profoundly as social media. Having access to the thoughts and emotions of other people worldwide, that’s a fundamental change to society,” said Kristina Lerman, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California who studies misinformation. “And you can’t understand it without access to data, access to observe.”

Takeshi Kawamoto, a Japanese software developer who runs a popular earthquake alert bot with more than three million followers, created the account back in 2007 as a hobby.

There are an incredible number of such bots on Twitter — useful, friendly or quirky accounts set up by people or group with a specific interest. There are weather bots, tools that combine long Twitter threads into one easy-to-read file, bots that send quotes from famous books or people, bots that remind you to stand up and stretch at random intervals during the day, bots that insert a little bit of nonsense and weirdness into your Twitter scrolling.

The earthquake bot Kawamoto created didn’t take off until the devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that hit Japan, when people turned to it for information about quakes and aftershocks.

Kawamoto was ready to shut down the bot when Twitter first announced it was going to charge for API access. Paying $1,200 a year for an account that is decidedly not making a profit was not going to be possible. Last week, Twitter announced that it would make a small exception to offer “write-only” API access for free to accounts that send fewer than 1,500 tweets a month.

This might help, but Kawamoto says the 1,500 limit will present a problem after a big earthquake with a lot of aftershocks. He would like to ask Mr. Musk to allow accounts to post more than 1,500 tweets on a pay-as-you-go basis.

So far, San Francisco-based Twitter has offered no other exceptions, although it’s possible that Mr. Musk will see one of the many tweets from developers working on earthquake relief who have been pleading for a solution.

For Mark Sample and his small army of Twitter bots, such as one that would send carefully curated quotes from Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” at random intervals, it’s too late. The Moby Dick bot, as well as one that sent out computer clip art from 1994 and one called “weird satellite” have all left Twitter. Some have moved to Mastodon, the social platform that some discouraged Twitter users have been migrating to.

Sample’s bots were part of “weird Twitter,” a quirky subculture of Twitter that peaked in the mid-2010s and included strange, fun, nonsensical bots sending bursts of randomness into people’s feeds.

“I’m kind of going through a mourning process, kind of grieving,” said Sample, a professor of digital studies at Davidson College in North Carolina. With the API “Twitter was doing something that none of the other social media platforms did, which is kind of like having this open playground. I mean, there were ways that people could take advantage of it and distort things and use it in malevolent ways. But it was also this terrific playground for hobbyists and creative people. None of the other social media platforms had that.”

For Sample, the breaking point was not the API announcement. It came last fall when Mr. Musk began mass firing Twitter workers and going after journalists who questioned or criticised him, he said. Building apps for a platform when someone just shut it all down on a whim, he said, is “not a good use of our time and creative energy.”

“I mean, it had a good run,” he said. “It’s like 15 years or whatever. So it’s a pretty good run. And maybe it’s time for something else.”

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Rescuers scramble in Turkey, Syria after earthquake kills 4,000

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Rescuers in Turkey and war-ravaged Syria searched through the frigid night into Tuesday, hoping to pull more survivors from the rubble after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake killed more than 4,000 people and toppled thousands of buildings across a wide region.

Authorities feared the death toll from Monday’s pre-dawn earthquake and aftershocks would keep climbing as rescuers looked for survivors among tangles of metal and concrete spread across the region beset by Syria’s 12-year civil war and refugee crisis.

Survivors cried out for help from within mountains of debris as first responders contended with rain and snow. Seismic activity continued to rattle the region, including another jolt nearly as powerful as the initial quake.

Workers carefully pulled away slabs of concrete and reached for bodies as desperate families waited for news of loved ones.

“My grandson is 1 1/2 years old. Please help them, please. … They were on the 12th floor,” Imran Bahur wept by her destroyed apartment building in the Turkish city of Adana on Monday.

Also Read | Why Turkey is prone to devastating earthquakes?

Tens of thousands who were left homeless in Turkey and Syria faced a night in the cold. In the Turkish city of Gaziantep, a provincial capital about 33 kilometres (20 miles) from the epicentre, people took refuge in shopping malls, stadiums, mosques and community centres.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared seven days of national mourning.

US President Joe Biden called Erdogan to express condolences and offer assistance to the NATO ally. The White House said it was sending search-and-rescue teams to support Turkey’s efforts.

The quake, which was centred in Turkey’s southeastern province of Kahramanmaras, sent residents of Damascus and Beirut rushing into the street and was felt as far away as Cairo.

It piled more misery on a region that has seen tremendous suffering over the past decade. On the Syrian side, the area is divided between government-controlled territory and the country’s last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Russian-backed government forces. Turkey, meanwhile, is home to millions of refugees from the civil war.

In the rebel-held enclave, hundreds of families remained trapped in rubble, the opposition emergency organisation known as the White Helmets said in a statement. The area is packed with some 4 million people displaced from other parts of the country by the war. Many live in buildings that are already wrecked from military bombardments.

Strained medical centres quickly filled with injured people, rescue workers said. Some facilities had to be emptied, including a maternity hospital, according to the SAMS medical organisation.

More than 7,800 people were rescued across 10 provinces, according to Orhan Tatar, an official with Turkey’s disaster management authority.

The region sits on top of major fault lines and is frequently shaken by earthquakes. Some 18,000 were killed in similarly powerful earthquakes that hit northwest Turkey in 1999.

The US Geological Survey measured Monday’s quake at 7.8, with a depth of 18 kilometres (11 miles). Hours later, a 7.5 magnitude temblor, likely triggered by the first, struck more than 100 kilometres (60 miles) away.

The second jolt caused a multistory apartment building in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa to topple onto the street in a cloud of dust as bystanders screamed, according to video of the scene.

Thousands of buildings were reported collapsed in a wide area extending from Syria’s cities of Aleppo and Hama to Turkey’s Diyarbakir, more than 330 kilometres (200 miles) to the northeast.

In Turkey alone, more than 5,600 buildings were destroyed, authorities said. Hospitals were damaged, and one collapsed in the city of Iskenderun.

Bitterly cold temperatures could reduce the time frame that rescuers have to save trapped survivors, said Dr. Steven Godby, an expert in natural hazards at Nottingham Trent University. The difficulty of working in areas beset by civil war would further complicate rescue efforts, he said.

Offers of help — from search-and-rescue teams to medical supplies and money — poured in from dozens of countries, as well as the European Union and NATO. The vast majority were for Turkey, with a Russian and even an Israeli promise of help to the Syrian government, but it was not clear if any would go to the devastated rebel-held pocket in the northwest.

The opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense described the situation in the enclave as “disastrous.” The opposition-held area, centred on the province of Idlib, has been under siege for years, with frequent Russian and government airstrikes. The territory depends on a flow of aid from Turkey for everything from food to medical supplies.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said 224 buildings in northwestern Syrian were destroyed and at least 325 were damaged, including aid warehouses. The U.N. had been assisting 2.7 million people each month via cross-border deliveries, which could now be disrupted.

At a hospital in Idlib, Osama Abdel Hamid said most of his neighbours died when their shared four-story building collapsed. As he fled with his wife and three children, a wooden door fell on them, shielding them from falling debris.

“God gave me a new lease on life,” he said.

In the small Syrian rebel-held town of Azmarin in the mountains by the Turkish border, the bodies of several dead children, wrapped in blankets, were brought to a hospital.

In the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, rescuers pulled two children alive from the rubble, and one could be seen lying on a stretcher on the snowy ground. Turkish broadcaster CNN Turk said a woman was pulled out alive in Gaziantep after a rescue dog detected her.

In Adana, 20 or so people, some in emergency rescue jackets, used power saws atop the concrete mountain of a collapsed building to open up space for any survivors to climb out or be rescued.

“I don’t have the strength anymore,” one survivor could be heard calling out from beneath the rubble of another building in Adana as rescue workers tried to reach him, said Muhammet Fatih Yavuz, a local resident.

In Diyarbakir, hundreds of rescue workers and civilians formed lines across a huge mound of wreckage, passing down broken concrete pieces and household belongings as they searched for trapped survivors.

At least 2,921 people were killed in 10 Turkish provinces, with nearly 16,000 injured, according to Turkish authorities.

The death toll in government-held areas of Syria climbed to 656 people, with some 1,400 injured, according to the Health Ministry. In the country’s rebel-held northwest, groups that operate there said at least 450 people died, with many hundreds injured.

Huseyin Yayman, a legislator from Turkey’s Hatay province, said several of his family members were stuck under the rubble of their collapsed homes.

“There are so many other people who are also trapped,” he told HaberTurk television by phone. “There are so many buildings that have been damaged. People are on the streets. It’s raining, it’s winter.”

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