Twitter is one of our third-party sign-in partners. It's not required that you sign in or sign up through Twitter or any third-party service to use Medium. However, linking your Twitter account to your Medium account enables you to extend the functionality of what you publish on Medium to other social networks.
Twitter offers 3 levels of access to user accounts:
- “read” (Read-only)
- “read-write” (Read & Write)
- “read-write-direct messages” (Read, Write, & Direct Message)
Our application, and most other Twitter enabled applications, uses the middle level (Read & Write). This level of permission allows to us to enable following @Medium on Twitter during the sign up flow, unless you opt-out of that option. We also use this permission to power a Medium-native Twitter sharing function. We won’t ever change your profile, send tweets you didn't initiate, follow other accounts on Twitter, or do anything else nefarious to your Twitter account.
Unfortunately, we aren't able to request Twitter permissions individually, it’s only by the levels established by Twitter. For more details, see Twitter’s developer site.