John Reena
Superstar
The spam bots on Twitter are beyond ridiculous. Instead of doing something about it, he’d rather tweet Nazi conspiracy theories and white grievances.
General Elon Musk Fukkery Thread
- Thread starter Armchair Militant
- Start date
Also and honest question when is Apple going to ban X from its App Store?
mr. free speech said the bots would stop under his watch. you can't even scroll past 3 replies (which are usually garbage blue check nonsense) without an ad for some aliexpress level crap, and every time i check my twitter i have a new fake porn girl follower. i used to get those like once every 2 weeks. i've gained about 50 followers this year and they're all bots. not that i ever had a big following, but since he did the "only nazis who pay me $8 will be amplified" crap, my tweets get like 8 views, so even people who follow me don't see em. i've only tweeted a couple times this year so i don't actually care anymore.
just in case you don't think "X" is only blue check morons these days, i actually made a completely pointless tweet yesterday with a trending hashtag, and it has 21 views. i have 400 followers and it was trending. all someone has to do is scroll past it and it counts as a view. that's literally impossible. Why is Elon trying to silence my new york rangers tweets?!
Poetical Poltergeist
Precise and cold hearted
This dude is going to go through mad lengths to try and get drumpf elected.
AStrangeName
Member of Snitch Syndication
Looks like Space Karen manage to kill Nitter with the API changes 
Looks like Space Karen manage to kill Nitter with the API changes
musk is so desperate for traffic that he's trying to coerce whats probably a sub 100K nitter userbase into signing up to use twitter instead.
AStrangeName
Member of Snitch Syndication
What sucks is that they ain't the only one who made APi changes that killed third party sites/apps as Reddit did the same last year. At least there's Reddit alternatives like Lemmy.World for example, Threads is basically IG, so the fukkery that people love on Twitter won't slide due to TOS. Bluesky recently allow public registration now and saw a surge of new people, so hopefully it leads to something.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Elon Musk's X Boasted About Its Traffic During The Super Bowl — Except Most Of It May Have Been Fake
Recent data unveiled a significant issue with bot traffic on Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly Twitter, particularly during the Super Bowl LVIII.
www.benzinga.com
Twitter front-end Nitter dies as Musk wins war against third-party services
Musk's changes kill service that let you view tweets without going to Twitter.
arstechnica.com
Twitter front-end Nitter dies as Musk wins war against third-party services
Musk's changes kill service that let you view tweets without going to Twitter.
JON BRODKIN - 2/15/2024, 1:27 PM
Enlarge
Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
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An open source project that let people view tweets without going to Twitter.com has shut down, as Elon Musk's changes seem to have closed off all possible ways to access the Twitter network without a user account.
Nitter provided an alternative front-end to Twitter but has been struggling for months. Nitter.net, the official Nitter instance, went down a few weeks ago.
NoLog, a Czech group that ran another Nitter instance, announced its demise today. NoLog operated one of the largest Nitter instances but is a different group than the one that created Nitter itself.
"Nitter is over—it's been a fun ride. Twitter blocked the last known way to access their network without a user account," the NoLog update said.
Users reported that many Nitter instances went down about eight months ago as Twitter (now called X) imposed new API restrictions. Some instances stayed online with workarounds, which no longer work.
"Most Nitter servers were using a technique of generating loads of temporary tokens that were used for accessing the content, but that path is now blocked as well," the NoLog update today said.
Twitter limited “any access they can’t monetize”
NoLog says its Nitter service was designed to maintain users' privacy."Over the last 2 years nitter.cz proxied over 10 Billion requests (>10,000,000,000) to Twitter, shielding you from tracking and ads, while providing a fast user interface... We never track our users, show ads or sell any data to any third party," the update said. "Our infrastructure runs on our own bare-metal servers, and we are not dependent on any cloud provider. That doesn't mean it's free. Running our servers costs us ~600€/month, and we are only able to pay for it thanks to users who are pitching in."
NoLog's update said that Nitter's main developer, Zed, "worked really hard to keep the project going" over the past few years. "But Twitter worked just as hard on closing their network down and limiting any access they can't monetize."
There are still some active Nitter instances, but they are expected to shut down in the near future as the remaining tokens expire. Three weeks ago, Zed wrote on GitHub that "Nitter is dead."
Guest-account workaround stopped working
In August 2023, Zed explained on GitHub that the project found a way to continue at least temporarily despite Twitter's API changes."I conclude that it is possible to easily acquire thousands of guest accounts within just a few minutes by using proxies, and they are all usable from a single IP address without getting rate limited," the August 2023 post said. "The rate limits per account work the same way as guest tokens, with a 15 minute window of x requests being allowed. It is therefore 100% feasible to get Nitter back up and running, it just requires a bunch of proxies. I will also develop a service that fetches these continuously, and lets operators request guest accounts for their own instances without having to pay for proxies."
The so-called guest account was really a "strange anonymous account old versions of the Android and iOS apps used to make when you opened them for the first time," Zed explained. "It doesn't use an email address, a password, or even a customizable username, and they cannot be viewed anywhere or logged into."
Each guest account essentially provided temporary credentials that worked with the Twitter API for about a month. It "is therefore not equivalent to setting up a bot farm to create fake X/Twitter accounts," Zed wrote.
Group sad that Twitter is led by “egomaniac”
Of course, this guest account workaround has since been closed off. Pointing to a recent discussion on GitHub, today's update from NoLog said there may be "a way to spin up a personal Nitter instance with your own account to keep the interface you are used to, but there is no guarantee this will work long-term."This also wouldn't work on a large scale. "Unfortunately regular accounts can only support a small group of users, so running a public instance this way is not feasible," the update said.
As for what Nitter users should do now, the NoLog post had a recommendation: "Don't trust corporations, especially those where one egomaniac has all the power. Use open-source and community driven solutions if you can (like Mastodon)."
NoLog accepts donations and offers a few other services, including file sharing with end-to-end encryption.
This article was corrected after publication to make it clear that NoLog and Nitter are separate entities.
Alexei Navalny's widow Yulia Navalnaya has X social media account suspended
Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation tagged Elon Musk in a post on X, asking him to "please explain exactly which rules were violated" by Yulia Navalnaya for the suspension.
Alexei Navalny's wife Yulia Navalnaya has X social media account suspended
Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation tagged Elon Musk in a post on X, asking him to "please explain exactly which rules were violated" by Yulia Navalnaya for the suspension.Tuesday 20 February 2024 13:57, UK
Image:Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Pic: Navalny Team/AP
Why you can trust Sky News
Alexei Navalny's widow Yulia Navalnaya has had her account suspended on social media platform X.
It is unclear why her account was suspended by the social network, formerly Twitter - which is owned by Elon Musk.
"Account suspended," a notice said on the site.
Mr Navalny, 47, was a high-profile and vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and had been serving a 19-year prison term when he died on Friday in an Arctic penal colony.
His Anti-Corruption Foundation tagged Mr Musk in a post on X, asking him to "please explain exactly which rules were violated" by Ms Navalnaya for the suspension.
Just over half an hour later, X restored Ms Navalnaya's access to the social media platform.
Earlier today on her X account, Ms Navalnaya urged the Kremlin to "give back Alexei's body and let him be buried with dignity".
On Monday he vowed to continue her husband's fight against the Kremlin - and accused Mr Putin of killing the country's opposition leader in a powerful nine-minute video.
In the video, published on YouTube and shared on X by Mr Navalny's official spokesperson Kira Yarmysh, she also alleged officials' refusal to hand over his body to his mother was part of a cover-up.
"They are cowardly and meanly hiding his body, refusing to give it to his mother and lying miserably while waiting for the trace of" poison to disappear, Ms Navalnaya said.
She suggested her husband might have been killed with a novichok-style nerve agent.
The Kremlin has denied the allegations as "unfounded" and "insolent".
Mr Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "These are absolutely unfounded, insolent accusations about the head of the Russian state."
In her video statement, Ms Navalnaya said: "By killing Alexei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart and half of my soul."
"But I still have the other half, and it tells me that I have no right to give up.
"I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny," she said.
Mr Navalny's mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said in a video on Tuesday taken outside the barbed wire of the prison where her son died: "For the fifth day, I have been unable to see him. They wouldn't release his body to me.
"And they're not even telling me where he is."
She added: "I'm reaching out to you, Vladimir Putin.
"The resolution of this matter depends solely on you. Let me finally see my son.
"I demand that Alexei's body is released immediately, so that I can bury him like a human being," she said in the footage posted on social media by Mr Navalny's team.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Please refresh the page for the fullest version.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
SpaceX will try to stop Russia using Starlink internet, Ukraine says, after Musk denied it was happening at all
Elon Musk denied that Russia had any access to Starlink, which Ukraine aggressively disputed. On Monday Ukraine said a deal was underway to stop it.
www.businessinsider.com
Government needs to tear up Musks contracts already
India farmers' protest: X admits to taking down posts and accounts
The micro-blogging site says it did so after receiving orders from the Indian government.
www.bbc.com
India farmers' protest: X admits to taking down posts and accounts
2 hours ago
By Nikhila HenryBBC News, Delhi
Getty Images
Farmers have been protesting since 13 February, demanding floor pricing for their crops
Social media major X (formerly Twitter) has admitted to taking down accounts and posts related to the ongoing farmers' protests in India.
The site has claimed it took down the pages after the Indian government sent them "executive orders".
The orders were "subject to potential penalties, including imprisonment", X said in a statement, adding that it "disagreed with these actions".
X's clarification was shared on their official handle @GlobalAffairs.
Several activists had earlier complained about their posts being removed.
X user and Indian journalist Mohammed Zubair wrote on Monday that "many influential X accounts" of reporters, influencers and prominent farm unionists covering farmers' protest in India were "suspended".
Mandeep Punia, a journalist, told the BBC that his account and that of his news platform - Gaon Savera - have been withheld.
"We are professional journalists covering rural India. We are reporting from the ground and the government doesn't want that. The government is blocking our voice, but equally this also affects our livelihood, our means of earning a living," he said
In its clarification, X said the accounts and posts were being withheld in India alone "in compliance with the orders".
It, however, added that the platform did not agree with the government action and maintained that "freedom of expression should extend to these posts".
The platform also said it had legally challenged the government's "blocking orders", without specifying which court they had petitioned.
India's main opposition Congress party has criticised the government for the clampdown, accusing it of trying to silence dissenting voices in a democratic country. Several X handles too have criticised the government for shutting down critical social media posts.
The government has yet not responded to the X statement or the BBC's request for a response.
Several farm unions in India have been on strike since 13 February seeking floor pricing, which is also called minimum support price, for their crops. The protesters have been attempting to march to India's capital, Delhi, from the neighbouring states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
But the authorities have heavily barricaded the city borders with barbed wire and cement blocks to stop them. Haryana and Uttar Pradesh states, which are ruled by the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have deployed a large number of police and paramilitary troops to stop the farmers from reaching Delhi.
Getty Images
Opposition parties in India have lent their support to the farmers' protest
Activists say farmers are a major voting bloc in India and the government does not want a protest spectacle - with farmers on tractors and other vehicles - on Delhi roads, especially with general elections due in the next few months.
In 2020, the farmers had started a similar protest and hunkered down at Delhi's borders for months and the government does not want a repeat of that.
While the government has held several rounds of talks with the unions to quell the protests, no consensus has been reached yet. On Wednesday, a 22-year-old protester died during a reported standoff with Haryana police. Punjab state authorities told the BBC that the cause of death was a " bullet wound to the head".
With additional reporting from Yogita Limaye