You've got legal and moral layers, then you've got to engage with the root problem that some services choose to use X as a channel to communicate with the general problem, but on top of that there's also the political intent to use Nitter explicitly to boycott Musk.
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.
Hanlon might say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but I've found more often than not that the two happen to come together.
More and more, this has been weaponised: "No, we're not evil! We never intended for this to happen. It was just an accident" Is something I hear too often
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
Much to my dismay. Most of his ideas have a long track record of being drastically incorrect or dangerous. And he treats his children like shit, so much that at least one of his children wants nothing to do with him. Also “spreads his DNA everywhere” is a really weird way to talk about how many children he has.
> and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
Agreed. He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life. But since we don’t live in a just world, I’m trying to do my (admittedly extremely small) part in correcting that.
> And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business,
This is a hilariously wrong way to describe him. The fascist is the man who sieg heil’ed, twice, in front of a large audience, and then backed it up via every politically-related action he’s taken since then.
You’re not responding to anything I’m actually saying, and your statements are so hyperbolic that it’s not worth continuing in good faith. I’d welcome a good faith conversation if you change your mind.
> Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
Here are four: Yamah Freeman, Gbessey Kiadu, Ibrahim Koroma, Achol Deng. Elon Musk ran the “agency” that fed USAID “into the wood chipper.” He is therefore responsible for their deaths. This is murder. Please retract your statement.
You mean like silencing users that use the term “cis” or “cisgender”? [0]
Or banning an account tracking his jet, even after explicitly stating that he was so committed to freedom of speech that he wouldn’t ban that specific account? [1]
Or complying significantly more often with suppression demands from authoritarian governments than the previous management of Twitter did? [2]
From your statements here it appears that you take everything he says at face value. I would strongly encourage you to stop doing that.
I understand. I think that when faced with specific examples that refute my claim, I’d also prefer to shy away from addressing them and instead only reply to the final sentence of the post which was the least important.
Perhaps the person you’re replying to was simply trying to stoop to your level, since you made the extremely weird “spreads his DNA everywhere” comment first. Perhaps this was, to borrow your misused phrase from elsewhere in this thread, the intellectually appropriate response.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
I was following along with your sentiment until the last, childish paragraph which really took the wind out of the sails.
I guess your point is you support things, not on a legal /impartial basis but on your perception of underdog/righteousness. Also, people who don't understand your initial post are psychopaths.
Fair enough, but that's a pretty shaky foundation upon which to build the law.
I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
>Imagine if videogames needed an external datacenter to run the tutorial levels.
I don't see how this is anything like that. The point here is to make it easier to give the user indications which has been a staple since forever, hell this is so much of a problem that there are entire solutions engineered to letting one user take control of the computer of another user through the net.
Beyond that, I'm sorry but looking for help in the context of videogames is extremely prevalent. That external datacenter to run the tutorial levels is sometimes called "Youtube" and others "Wikia".
Moderation as in "You can't call the other posted 'fuckface'" and moderation as in "I will delete every mention of this news story because it's negative to the agenda I want to push" are not, at all, the same thing.
In fact, I wouldn't call the latter "moderation" at all, rather it's mods abusing their power to push political propaganda, but they do it through moderation in terms of action.
> I will delete every mention of this news story because it's negative to the agenda I want to push
Thankfully this is extremely rare on the major platforms. "This news story is fake as fuck and is causing trouble such as people going to throw Molotov cocktails at random mosques" is the common scenario.
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.
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 what some motivated cable news researchers decided to abuse statistics to say. To be generous, I would say the article makes a significantly stronger causal claim than the experiment supports. The best description is a good exploratory algorithm audit with weak statistical and causal inference.
The analysis rests on just nine synthetic accounts, treats thousands of highly correlated feed impressions as if they provide robust independent evidence, lacks a proper baseline for the political content available on X, and reports no meaningful uncertainty, significance testing or adequately powered replication.
Every social media site is like this now. They fear the scrapers. Most of the people complaining about having to log in on X, they intentionally have no account in the first place because they don't like the site's owner or something.
I say this as part of the exception. The only reason I don't use X is because they banned me for no reason. Probably not the common case.
You've got legal and moral layers, then you've got to engage with the root problem that some services choose to use X as a channel to communicate with the general problem, but on top of that there's also the political intent to use Nitter explicitly to boycott Musk.
reply