: Twitters Internal Chaos Is Slowing Turkey Earthquake Relief Efforts, Volunteers Say #WorldNEWS For the past four days, Hakan Özalp’s Twitter feed has been an endless stream of tragedy.

Twitters Internal Chaos Is Slowing Turkey Earthquake Relief Efforts, Volunteers Say #WorldNEWS
For the past four days, Hakan Özalp’s Twitter feed has been an endless stream of tragedy. From his home in Amsterdam, the Turkish business professor keeps scrolling through names, phone numbers, and addresses identifying where people are trapped in the debris from a 7. 8 magnitude earthquake that devastated parts of his home country on Monday, killing at least 20,000 people in southern Turkey and neighboring Syria. “It’s hard not to despair,” Özalp says.
Özalp is one of many who leapt into action from afar in the wake of the quake and its aftershocks. Within hours, a group of thousands of developers and analysts from Turkey’s tech community, aided by volunteers from across the globe, had come together to scrape social data that might guide rescue workers. The effort, which had grown to 22,000 people by Friday, collected tweets through location-tagging and hashtags, fixed any errors, and created a heat map showing where the calls for help from survivors were concentrated. The final data was then shared with rescue crews in the field and organizations scrambling to provide aid.

Social media data, especially from Twitter, has long been an invaluable tool in the wake of natural disasters. But this time, according to four data scientists and researchers involved in the rescue effort, the work has been hampered by recent changes to Twitters API, the programming interface that enables third parties to access and analyze public data on the platform. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October and restructured the company, laying off almost 80% of its staff, data streaming has slowed down and problems with the mechanisms that allow programmers, academics, journalists and NGOs to collect public data have intensified, they say. Twitters portals that connected developers to the companys engineering teams have also gone inactive, severing another important link.

Earthquake Help ProjectA heat map built from calls for help in areas struck by the earthquake in Turkey, scraped from social media data by the Earthquake Help Project
Twitters sudden announcement on Feb. 2 that it would end free access to its API in a week—a deadline that has been extended to Feb. 13—is likely to further impact the coordination of vital relief efforts in the affected areas, say the data scientists and researchers involved with the rescue effort. This has left hundreds of volunteers frantically trying to contact the company—and Musk himself—in search of clarity. (Twitter did not respond to TIMEs request for comment. )
Twitters critical role in disaster relief was underlined Wednesday when the Turkish government restricted access to the platform for roughly 12 hours.