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Thank you for your understanding. And the trust you have put into the XCancel project.

The fact that so many large companies are still on X is so wrong.

Yeah, or local governments, or governments in general, seems strange to me too. But then probably they'd use Facebook/Instagram/Whatever instead of Twitter if Twitter wasn't available, and seemingly it's impossible for them to use something that isn't built like a panopticon that also wants to slurp up as much data from their users as possible.

There should be a law mandating government agencies to not limit their electronic communications to private third party platforms.

If they post something on Twitter, or worse, Facebook, they must also provide a copy of the post on their own website. Some kind of online government gazette, if you will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette

How would you define it so the internet wouldn't also be considered a third-party platform?

Why?

Why is it “so wrong” to meet your audience where they are?

The same reason is wrong to require a Google or Apple phone to exercise basic civil duties within government services. You are gating the service, or information, behind a 3rd party ToS, a login, and basically stating that you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data to such companies.

Why is it wrong? Is it wrong to require people to use certain tools? I don’t think so. It’s the same thing as requiring dress code to go to the tribunal or anything formal.

People here overthink so much about this topic.

Because the owner of said tool is a white nationalist

I've made this same comment several times now.

To live in our 'free' western society, you need to register your birth, get a social security number, and attend state dictated education.

Life in general is now gated, and if you do not abide by the rules you do not get the benefits of society. How is this any different to "you are not allowed to have it until you hand over personal data".

....in your own opinion.

Why would anyone use any xitter service voluntarily at this point

The service works just fine and it is a decent way to get the latest news.

For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.

X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.

Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.

I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.

I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.

Or get this: you could read news if that's what you're interested in.

Social media isn't news. It's entertainment.

I'd be more interested in your concrete alternative recommendation on where to get the rumors/insider news about AI rather than your opinion on how I should use social media.

Social media isn't news

What is? TV, Radio, Newspapers, Town square, are all entertainment

If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel, which effectively helps maintain the cultural relevance of X.

On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.

For me, it's just the easiest fix whenever somebody shares a tweet with me, and it fails to load, or shows me some forced login popup. I just click between x and .com in my URL bar, write "cancel", and it suddenly just works.

Get the Libredirect extension and this will happen automatically (to a server that is actually working).

Libredirect

Just looked at it. Unfortunately it requests permissions for all domains, not only the relevant set.

Suppose you're on HN and someone posts a link to X. Is the correct reaction

1. Pretend it isn't there. 2. Flag it and pretend it isn't there. 3. Flag it and read the content somewhere else in case it's relevant.

You can knowledge it's there, and just not read it. There's lots of links on the internet that I don't click.

I'm sure there are people who genuinely need to receive information that's only on that site, but personally I'm enjoying the feeling of the joy of missing out.

What if the post is like "we discovered AGI (for real this time, not clickbait)" - will you pretend AGI wasn't discovered?

(for real this time, not clickbait)

That sounds likes something a clickbait author would write.

4. Click the link

5. Accept that you won't click on the link

Congratulations, Elon Musk has just forced you to either feed his propaganda machine or successfully locked you out of the conversation.

Yes, and? I can't bend reality to make it otherwise.

XCancel can.

"XCancel Taken Down Again" is the title of this thread.

Given its extremely liberal content moderation policy, how is X a propaganda machine?

Here's a pretty in-depth investigation into the workings of X as far-right propaganda machine: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...

right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.

Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.

The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.

Over half of the political content shown to our new X users came from accounts categorised as extreme. Of the content from extreme authors, 72% of posts came from right-leaning accounts.

So journalists ran a study with extremely poor sampling, base rate, and classification methodology designed by left-wing researchers and activists groups (including groups explicitly opposed to X), found the conclusions they wanted to find, and spent the second half of their article decrying the lack of heavy-handed moderation that pre-Musk Twitter used to control speech.

All we can actually derive from that article is that X’s new user recommendation system exposed a small number of near-default, low-feedback, synthetic accounts to more content that left-wing “misinformation” researchers classified as “right-wing”.

Musk also uses plenty of heavy handed moderation; it's just almost all directed at the left. For instance: https://crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethinc-...

Before X flagged me as a bot for no reason, I had a mostly unused account and can confirm it was showing me a ton of right-wing content. Also lots of stuff related to Elon Musk in particular.

On the flip side, X has less moderation, and it's pretty even-handed. They're allowing a lot of pretty mild right-wing content that Twitter was banning people for.

Damn it's almost as if this was a conversation we should have had around 2018 at the latest. Like evident bias in social networks was a real concern all along.

What was the response every single time? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter".

I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this.

Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit too for people to get a clue.

Yeah, most of the people are upset because they're Democrats politically on Twitter, and the old one catered to them.

As far as I can tell, the only way Twitter has substantively changed over the past few years is that a small (but non-trivial) number of politically obsessed left-wingers have voluntarily self-exited. Everything else is narrative.

That's not what the data says: https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...

It's also become a whole lot more hostile to anonymous visitors, hence the topic under discussion. That's not just narrative but a fact.

You mean like Zuck prevents me from seeing any Instagram content without login?

I wish HN would simply ban links to X.

HN is a venture capital fund. That will happen if and only if it becomes profitable to do so.

I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).

I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.

Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?

And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?

It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).

Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.

Maybe if people didn't make services like XCancel, the impracticality of X would be more salient.

It isn't. We know this because there was a time before xcancel and people just accepted they needed an account.

It can happen - nobody would post an Instagram link to HN. But for X it did not happen.

Notice the EU's Digital Markets Act is a liability shield for Nitter instances hosted in the EU.

That assumes the people who need XCancel most are aware of its existence, but from what I can tell only folks like us are.

I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.

Emergency notifications, mainly.

Such as what exactly? I imagine that comes through multiple channels.

Some people have Wifi but not cell phone signal. A single tweet has very robust, existing infrastructure, over the “one email per person in a mailing list” style of email; and SMS is DoA when there’s no cell phone.

No phone, no TV, only a PC that they sit at logged in to Twitter all day refreshing their feed in case a local emergency comes up?

I can't imagine a disaster apocalyptic enough to take out cell phone service but somehow spare the power and the internet. Seems like one of those things that you would never have to prepare for and be alright.

For the most obscene example, life safety critical announcements during disasters.

Usually just information about events, road closures etc.

It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).

What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And you know how I find out more if I want to? I go to their website.

Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company. For many people and the companies or organizations they lead, “everyone uses X/Twitter” and/or “everyone can access X/Twitter”.

We got to this state because, when it was called Twitter, it positioned itself in the market as, exactly this. It’s only now, when there’s been some major changes to it, that we’re paying the piper.

Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company.

Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.

Public communications from government entities really should be legally required to be disseminated on public forums (ideally properly hosted on .gov domains for easy verification, with RSS feeds) Cross-posting on other platforms should be allowed (with backlink to the .gov), but the .gov should be authoritative.

Unfortunately that requires a level of technical competence that most government entities don't have in the US. Not to mention the ridiculous requirements/processes that are placed on official govt software.

It is 2026, it is not hard to publish a "blog" , if you want to share that same content over social networks that's fine but it should be a requirement that the data doesn't solely live in private walled "social" networks

How is posting on wordpress.com or tumblr.com any different from posting on x.com?

1. It's always publicly readable;

2. It is not reliant on any singular corporation, or trusting any singular corporation.

3. The established domain name system proves authenticity.

And of course the information can still be posted to X, etc.

1 is untrue, 2 is untrue, 3 is the same as x.com

Yeah i don't get it, using xcancel is like "that'll show ya" in a weak manner. You are seeing the same tweet.

What was the Chinese alternative ? At this point I’m just going to use that instead, lawyers won’t be able to take that down.

Not a popular question here, but what's the difference between xcancel or archive.org, and torrents and other pirate services alike? (except twitter is user content, yet per their tos xcancel is still piracy)

Proposal:

Set up a mastodon account that mirrors your (or someone elses) X account.

This way people who want can continue using X, and other people can read & refer to their posts without needing to log into X.

I've been wondering why ~everyone hasn't already been doing this, so my guess is that Twitter's API doesn't allow it.

I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point when it doesn't serve the public interest or the interest of customers who deserve at least some choice. It's as unreasonable for them as using Instagram or a dating app for something intended for broad reach and accessibility.

I don't particularly like Bluesky, but it's publicly readable and has RSS. Any real solution would be protocol or standard instead of yet another closed service, though. For now, I see Nitter and XCancel as a temporary fix until people abandon it for whatever practical, economic, or political reason(s) they may have.

The reason is simple: they were using Twitter when it was publicly readable and had RSS, and they have no selfish reason to stop. (Selfless reasons don't count, everybody is selfish)

I don't see how any government or business (especially the former) can justify using X at this point

If your logic is that some citizens won't be able to read what is posted there, then I assume you similarly object to other social media platforms, newspapers, cable TV stations, etc.

If my local government or some local business was limited to using one specific newspaper, this would indeed be a problem.

And in reverse, having a concentration of readers (users) on one platform, means that whoever controls that newspaper (platform) gets to be kingmaker for the government and the businesses.

Free speech as a constitutional requirement binding on a government to allow it is great; that government then using one specific private corporation that can use its own status as a non-government actor to have free speech rights rather than free speech responsibilities, means it is a de facto loss of free speech for everyone else.

There is no constitutional entitlement to receive government information through one's preferred newspaper, website, or social network.

it is a de facto loss of free speech for everyone else.

You seem to be confused about what 1A is and what it guarantees. It is a restriction on government action against your speech, not a general requirement that everyone have equal access to every privately owned communications channel.

Are there other instances available? X can't ban them all.

I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.

Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.

There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.

X DMCA'd the repo.

No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.

No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/

Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.

Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:

X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...

I thought the US courts decided that APIs aren’t copyrightable, and the rest of it is not their content.

https://status.d402.de/ and many other index pages

Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.

ITYM https://status.d420.de/

Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.

So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...

So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.

For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.

I'm calling bullshit. Twitter was always hostile to logged-out users. You could say "Well technically I was talking about 2006 before it got big" so I'll just say it was just as bad 10 years ago as it is today.

Nah 10 years ago I could view the whole website logged out. Now it's been reduced to a single post with no replies.

pretty sure it was even worse ten years ago cause very active twitter users would pay for 3rd party twitter apps (maybe twitter didn't have an official app back then? ~2012-2013)

I don't know why but to me the worse bit of it is the giant emoji finger that keeps trying to click the sign up button.

They fired that guy years ago, so no one knows how to decom it without breaking everything

This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.

There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.

This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.

but how to do that without protecting the content from enemy LLM companies scraping?

On the off chance someone thinks this is serious, being locked behind a login doesn't prevent your site from being scraped.

Indeed, the shitter authors recommended you buy a bundle of Twitter accounts with 2FA details when setting up your own instance, to avoid getting rate-limited.

There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.

https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...

This wasn‘t recommended officially by the authors, right? I saw it on someone‘s codeberg fork but not on the official repo

Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

On that same page:

UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

Following legal advice

It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but the software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Those people should seek their own legal advice.

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Meanwhile it's OK for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to hack companies all willy-nilly. Mad world!

Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?

Reddit says hello

And Reddit has also started blocking signed out users in my region.

They are now telling me that I need an account to use old.reddit.com (the only usable version of Reddit UI). Needless to say, I have stopped visiting Reddit completely.

Perhaps more frustratingly, if you bite the bullet and browse the "new" version on your mobile browser, the page will eventually become non-responsive and have ~60% of your screen covered by a bottom banner that prompts you to download their app to continue. It's like they are actively trying to kill their userbase.

On mobile, uBO has been able to get around the "use our app" block. It took a week or two for the filters to get updated but now it is a non-issue. Tested in Firefox and Vivaldi on Android.

FWIW, Old Reddit Redirect manages to somehow still be usable without a user.

users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content

They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.

Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.

signups are often still rejected with no explanation given

That's pretty odd. When I google this, there are claims that this is to prevent spam accounts. Obviously, if you choose not to take them at their word, one can read all sorts of odd reasons into it.

That exchange might be believable if bots didn't exist on X, but they absolutely do, hence the search for other explanations.

Considering who owns it, it'd be weird if they didn't want a carefully curated echo chamber of sanitized thought.

'Echo chamber' is an odd thing to say. X has many center left and hard left accounts, they're not banned in the same "women can't be men" was during Woke 1.0.

...really?

Elon Musk declares ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’ will be considered slurs on Twitter that can be punishable with suspension

https://fortune.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-declares-cis-cisgen...

https://x.com/search?q=cisgender&src=typed_query&f=live

There are tons and tons of people using the term. All the time. Last result was 11 seconds ago (as of posting this).

Their tweets are shadowbanned and you only found them because you searched for the slur. All other avenues of discovery are prevented.

FWIW, X is far less of an echo chamber than Bluesky, Truth Social or Reddit.

They're simply doing this to boost engagement and break scrapers.

Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?

Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.

Do they not understand you can still serve ads to non-logged-in users? They can still be tracked nearly as effectively with fingerprinting.

without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to

That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

That’s not a market. You are not exchanging anything of value. It’s a public service. One might as well lament that Ferrari doesn’t offer cars to the millions of people who would gladly take one for free.

As if the new owners of twitter give a shit about its sustainability.

It is all about capturing the platform to change the conversation around 2024 US presidential election cycle and US politics.

It’s effectively become a political propaganda machine owned by billionaires

He was forced to buy it after desperately trying to pull out, and shitlibs cheered.

Free speech absolutist, btw.

What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?

You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.

I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be.

Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.

The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.

The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.

The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.

Many municipalities have text message alerts these days. I doubt it’s 100% coverage but I bet most of us can live with that or currently do.

Optics and logic are two different things. The optics seem to be working out well for him, for some reason.

Sure but my point is the Twitter experience is trash and not required like, say, paying an evil ISP or interacting with Google (for 99.9% of people abandoning and fully dodging Google is incredibly difficult). It’s working out for him because people won’t leave (even though engagement and user numbers are still below pre-acquisition numbers). It only has value because of his acquiring it with his other company. Prior its value was tanked. It’s a crap site that isn’t profitable and serves as a mouthpiece for his politics and whims.

You can all walk away. You don’t need it.

Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.

That’s not what free speech is.

Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.

Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.

Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.

Nobody is arguing about the legal boundary of Freedom of speech, you're the only one making this argument.

We're talking about the quolloquial "free speech", here.

Could you give your colloquial definition, because its clearly different than mine.

"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.

It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.

Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.

"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.

This is one way to define it, yes, but Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist” which I would argue means that he feels speech should be maximally free.

It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost".

I have never meant it in that way, and I’m not sure why you thought I did.

To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.

This is possibly pedantic but this statement as written is false. I can view single tweets just fine, and I don’t see ads.

Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.

That analogy doesn’t really work here, IMO. My only point is that it’s objectively true that speech behind a login wall is less free (as in freedom) than speech not behind a login wall, and so a (non-hypocritical) “free speech absolutist” should always prefer the latter.

is that how musk defines it?

i get the sense he instead thinks of free speech maximalism as people need to hear him and completely censor alternatives

Twitter heavily censors speech on the platform itself by downranking things they do not like without any transparency.

Back when they disliked and downranked the opposite kind of thing, nobody on your side agreed that it was "censorship".

Free Speech isn’t about who is listening, it’s about who is speaking. Just because you can’t hear it doesn’t necessarily mean the person did not speak freely.

I am speaking about free speech (lowercase, in the colloquial sense), not Free Speech (the constitutional right). In the context of this type of free speech, if you have two identical posts, and one is behind a login wall and one isn’t, the one not behind the login wall is objectively more free.

I am speaking about free speech (lowercase, in the colloquial sense), not Free Speech (the constitutional right).

So am I.

If a comedian is doing a bit at a bar and they charge a $5 cover to get in is that infringing on “free speech”. Of course not, that’s absurd. Why would be it any different online?

I agree, but also, it gets kinda messy here because Musk's "free speech" purchase if twitter was based on his understanding that Twitter not publishing content they deemed inflammatory or misinform was a violation of free speech, which I also don't think is true?

So I guess we're several layers of misunderstanding deep at this stage, and X's lockdown is ironic if its not free speech according to the flawed understanding of free speech it advocates? I dunno.

The accusation was that Twitter was working with the US government to censor speech on the government's behalf. Which would be a first amendment violation. The FBI's defense is that they technically never ordered Twitter to take down anything, but merely "flagged" posts and sent those flags to Twitter execs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files

This type of loophole was (likely) closed after the ruling of Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" executive order.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-411_3dq3.pdf

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14149

Is that a first amendment violation though if they voluntarily complied?

It’s a private company. Free speech doesn’t mean I’m entitled to use your property to post and amplify my speech.

I also find the context of the whole thing suspect since Trump in his second administration has openly used the FCC and other federal pressures to attack speech he doesn’t like and Musk’s X has not been “free speech absolutist.”

I always thought it was just the far right being mad their side wasn’t in charge, and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated.

Is that a first amendment violation though if they voluntarily complied?

The entire point of the case was to determine exactly that. Read the judgement. If it were an open and shut case, it never would have made it to the supreme court.

and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated

How in the world did you get to that conclusion from Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" order?

Can someone please explain to me any actual guidelines-based reason for the parent comment to have been flagged and killed (I vouched for it)?

"Nothing can shut down open source" - Elon Musk, LITERALLY TODAY: https://nitter.click/elonmusk/status/2099026767357120523

He speaks out both sides of his mouth.

Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.

It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping

Edit: not a moral stance

I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?

Why do we put up with it?

You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.

I actually do want to do something. I started to scrape Twitter to make it freely available. The web should stay open.

I am also doing something, by hosting one of the public instances of Nitter.

Nitter is useful for sporadic random access to tweets, but for public feeds like municipal authorities etc. it would be useful if someone scraped the feed and re-hosted the feed from their own server, without being hobbled by rate limits. Is that what you're doing?

Yes, exactly. I limit the scraping to popular enough accounts. The wikimedia community is already organized to decide who deserves a Wikipedia page so I use that.

Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?

Everyone who goes to twitter copies the posts to their computers.

Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.

So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run

  mtr xcancel.com

I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?

No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.

Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.

I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.

I think its more than the law doesn’t understand the technology.

Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.

Are they distilling?

Distilling isn’t copying and redistributing, for the same reason that you reading a story and then writing your own story based on ideas you learned is different from you reading a book, writing all the words down verbatim, and then publishing it as your own.

There's a button on X that allows me to repost someone else's content.

Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.

I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”.

Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.

Transformation.

Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.

Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company

So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed?

Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.

That's exactly the way UK courts are heading, see Getty vs Stability AI. The court ruled that there's no infringment because the model doesn't store exact copies, just derived weights, and therefore when it generates new images those aren't copies of protected works.

That's stupid, these courts are stupid

It should have nothing to do with storing copies it should have to do with what the models can produce. And it's clear they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.

That shouldn't satisfy anyone.

they can produce copyrighted works, they've just been tuned so they don't.

In other words... they can't. A different one can but this one can't. The court is not stupid, and will consider this fact.

They can't unless the tuner produces a copyrighted work for whatever their purpose would be, because they can step in and "detune" the thing at 3am for a competitive advantage.

You can produce copyrighted works and have just been tuned not to lol. I fail to see how limiting an ability to comply with the law is any different from just complying with the law?

Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

Precedent is pretty clear:

What cases are you citing when you say this?

Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.

Bartz is an author though.

Is X claiming ownership of the posts people make because pretty much every single social media site doesn't so they have section 230 protection.

They can just round up some friendly users and sue under their names. Starting with their own corporate accounts?

Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.

I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.

I think that's more true in image generation than in text? At least, all the money is in LLMs that write code, not LLMs that write O'Reilley-style coding books.

I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...

Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:

Who has the gold makes the rules.

If a society operates under a rule like this, it is no better than Russia or any other tyranny where law is for me but not for thee. This is not how it should work in a supposedly free and lawful country.

That’s how works everywhere

It’s been working like that in the US for a while.

Do you think the bottom 99% of the country would ever win a legal fight with one of the tech billionaires?

Even if they were 100% in the right, they could just drag out the legal process with endless motions and appeals until the average Joe lacked the funds to continue the fight.

Well I have heard that some people managed to sue some corporations and actually win some cases before.

No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days

If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?

There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.

And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.

It's depriving X of impressions that they could monetise, no? Xcancel doesn't have to make money itself, it just has to impair the rights of the copyright holder. Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...

I don't really buy this.

It's like saying "toaster oven/air fryer combos" don't actually compete with toaster ovens or air fryers because they are creating a market for something better

Of course they complete.

Toaster ovens compete with toasters. Microwaves compete with toaster ovens.

Just because it's not the exact same product doesn't mean it's not competing

Would I be allowed to steal LG's designs for a microwave and make a "superwave" that does laundry and heats food? Would you claim those products don't compete because the superwave is "something better"?

It's not illegal to write a similar book or song to an existing one. Copyright only protects existing works from literal copying (possibly in part).

How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe that's clearly derived from the top three results and then placed above those results? That sounds like it's both transformative (in that the recipe created by the AI may not match any one of the scraped recipes perfectly) and also competitive (in that the AI takes page views away from the pages it got the recipes from)

How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe

Recipes can’t be copyrighted

Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...

Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers.

I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).

At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty.

Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.

As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.

According to Wikipedia:

In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies

But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?

If the name Bright Data is ringing a bell to anyone, it’s probably because they are a (the?) primary offender running the LG TV “residential proxy” (botnet)

Scraping is legal, but IIRC scraping authenticated contents is not.

Isn't Nitter abusing account sign-in for this?

Anyone can make an account, though, and instantly access that content, so Elon doesn't really have any leg to stand on by claiming they're private. It's not the same as Cambridge Analytica scraping stuff you had to have certain privileges to see by tricking the system into granting those privileges.

Elon unfortunately may have a leg to stand on, because it doesn't functionally matter whether "anyone can make an account and see it". I don't believe any legal ruling to date has been fine with that distinction.

But if they ban the nitter operator surely you can't just bypass that ban legally by making a new X account. That there are bans and the operator has to bypass bans by pretending to be a new person I think that this makes it different.

It's like a club that checks ids to ban people. I wouldn't call that club open to the general public.

Not true. Creating an account requires agreeing to the ToS. And if the ToS prohibit this kind of usage, then legally, it's not allowed.

See hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn. hiQ was scraping LinkedIn using accounts, and they were found to be in breach of LinkedIn's terms.

It depends what you mean by "not allowed". Breaking ToS isn't a crime, but you might be sued for damages, but how can they show there were any damages?

To fix this:

1) Nitter offers a deal: download our browser extension, sign up for Twitter, and we'll give you some kind of perk (Amazon credits, whatever).

2) Browser extension surfs Twitter on the user's behalf, scraping and sending copies to Nitter.

3) We find out how serious the legal system is about prosecuting scraping.

The whole point is not signing up for twitter. If signing up for twitter wasn't a problem, Nitter wouldn't exist in the first place.

scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.

if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.

sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.