LEGAL

Cease and desist letters from firm headed by free speech absolutist

X, the social media mouthpiece of free speech absolutist Elon Musk, has reportedly sent legal takedown notices to Nitter and related service XCancel over alleged data scraping and rules violations.

XCancel's home page now contains some minimal text stating: "On Monday 24th August at 8 PM EST, we received at [sic] letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel."

It says the service has been halted "until further notice."

Nitter's maintainer, zedeus, adds in a separate statement : "nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I'm seeking legal advice and won't be commenting further on the specifics for now." 

Although the repository is still on GitHub, it is marked as archived and read-only, with some explanatory text added to the README.MD.

Nitter provided a way for users to read posts on X without requiring an account. There was no JavaScript or ads, a user's IP could not be tracked, and it was generally a good deal snappier than the official X client, just read-only. It was the service behind platforms such as XCancel.

It has also been a thorn in X's side for years, giving privacy-minded users a way to view posts without logging into Elon Musk's social media mouthpiece.

This isn't the first time Nitter has reeled at the hands of X. In January 2024, zedeus announced the end of the project after Twitter (the original name of X) removed the guest account feature. A year later, the project was back after it found a way to work around the restrictions.

However, this appears to have triggered the lawyers, judging by reports that the letter alleges data scraping and violations of X's rules.

The Register asked X for comment, but has yet to receive a response.

X isn't alone in taking exception to data scraping. Meta, for example, fired a sueball at Israel-based web scraping firm Bright Data in 2023, but X's cease and desist notice sits awkwardly alongside Musk's own proclamations about free speech, and his corporation's use of public X data to train Grok.

Plenty of organizations continue to post on X, but accessing those posts without an X account has become an order of magnitude more difficult without services such as Nitter and XCancel. ®