Hey Twitter, why is getting an API key like asking for Nuclear Launch Codes?

I've been doing some work on figures and analysis for our court case and this gave me an excuse to re-learn to code. I mentioned that when I posted about the specific drops in crypto prices following the Facebook and Google advertising bans in 2018.

One of the projects I'm using to get back into coding and learn Python was a pet project to tweet the level of The Kinneret, Israel's largest fresh water lake, every day. It's quite a famous lake as it's mentioned extensively in the Bible (Hebrew and later). You may have heard of it as the "Sea of Galilee". A few years ago I did write a basic Python script to do this which did work but I wanted to reinvigorate my skills. I'll go into those details elsewhere. Pictures and video of the Kinneret here.

So I wanted to send a tweet every day, one like the following:

I previously had a developer account and API keys and when I went to check on Twitter it told me I had to reapply for their new API. So I filled in the forms and was a little puzzled by some of the questions, especially around government use of data. I got back an answer:

I wrote back:

The main thing I want to do is just tweet the following every day when the new number is released:

I did this a long time ago but I’ve reworked the code and now I’m using the official government data as a source.

Then came this rather curious reply, possibly because I used the trigger word "government data":

Keep in mind the ONLY thing I'm planning to do is send one tweet per day! So I replied:

I doubt anyone in the government of Israel will be specifically interested in my tweets but as they’ll be public, everyone in the world will have “access to Twitter content” that I post!

Please note, we require an exhaustive and complete list of all public sector entities who would have access to Twitter content under this use case

That would be ANYONE IN THE WORLD who is on Twitter so I guess the exhaustive list is EVERY GOVERNMENT IN THE WORLD that uses Twitter.

I do not intend to analyse tweets, I want to send out a single daily tweet like this:

~~~ embed:1318905958878351361?s=20 twitter metadata:YnJpYW5vZmxvbmRvbnx8aHR0cHM6Ly90d2l0dGVyLmNvbS9icmlhbm9mbG9uZG9uL3N0YXR1cy8xMzE4OTA1OTU4ODc4MzUxMzYxfA== ~~~

Is this really so complicated?

Apparently, that wasn't enough:

To which, my only resort was, literally, go nuclear:

Text:

I ONLY intend to send ONE Tweet per day from my own personal account. That tweet will look like this:

On Thu Oct 22 2020 the level of the Kinneret is -209.91m dropping 5 cm in 7 days.

1.88m higher than 1 year ago (2019 -211.795m)
4.62m higher than 2 years ago (2018 -214.53m)
4.31m higher than 3 years ago (2017 -214.215m)
#Kinneret #SeaOfGalilee http://brianoflondon.me/kinneret/

Right now I can send that by copy pasting the output of my own Python script and that gives a tweet like this (I assume you can look at twitter):

I just want to automate the process and I’m learning to code in Python to do that. I don’t plan on interacting (via Python) with any replies. I will do that as usual as my human self.

Have I applied for the wrong kind of account to do something this simple?

This process and these questions seem rather crazy for such a simple use case. I thought you were running a platform not a system for launching nuclear weapons.

I guess a Twitter API key really is a very valuable thing if they make you jump through these hoops to get it. Meanwhile, as this was going on, I found the old API keys I had in a backup of my other computer and was able to start testing my script which is working (though I'm still running it manually at this point).

I was also interested in getting hold of a historical data set... the story of how I got that will come soon, meanwhile here's the graph which you can explore on my site

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