Richard Stallman's Article on Why to Avoid Twitter (Now 'X')
As per his personal site, stallman.org
Ex-Twitter now shows ads that don't identify themselves as ads, and don't say who is doing the advertising.
Musk seems determined to adopt for Ex-Twitter every nasty thing that users have criticized web sites for.
Ex-Twitter has started requiring (in certain countries) every new user to verify per phone numbers and a payment method.
The user is required to pay a trivial sum, but the surveillance implied by the payment is more important than the payment itself.
How quitting Facebook and Ex-Twitter enabled one user to change for the better his approach to life.
Ex-Twitter has stopped labeling paid ads at all, for some users.
On Ex-Twitter, scammers now buy the "blue checkmark" that used to indicate verification of identity.
The US National Weather Service has been using Twitter to receive reports from storm spotters. Due to recent Musk madness, that has started to fail.
Twitter is unsuitable for anything that really needs to work.
Musk banned Twitter users from posting information about where to find them on other sites. (There is a report that Twitter has partly reversed this, but no announcement.)
Of course, you shouldn't be used by Facebook or Instagram at all, anyway.
Twitter's policy may be illegal in the US. I wonder, though, whether FTC enforcement power can prevail against a billionaire who is willing to lose millions of dollars as a result of his choice of policies. If he chooses to defy the FTC, can they do more than fine Twitter a few million?
A site called nitter.net makes it easy to read anything published on Twitter. You can contact nitter.net through Tor, and it does not ask you to log in. (It does ask for a username, which confused me; turns out that is the account you want to look at tweets of.) The site does not send Javascript code to users' browsers. It seems entirely good, but does only reading.
Tweeting without nonfree software is possible but not easy.
As of January 2020, Twitter reportedly requires users to give a mobile phone number or it blocks their accounts. Here is a reference in Spanish. I would appreciate having an attestable reference to cite for this.
Moreover, the report said that it is impossible to create an account without running nonfree Javascript software.
Please email me if you have newer information about this issue.
Twitter has implemented new non-privacy settings; the default is substantial surveillance, if users don't turn it off.
Twitter makes it impossible to create an account without providing a mobile phone number. You might have to buy a "burner phone" to do it.
That article provides advice for those who want to run a Twitter account and protect their identities from a state that represses whistleblowers. But even if you will proudly put your real name on the account, you have every reason not to let Twitter know your mobile phone number.
Twitter shut down Jim Weber's account after he posted a copy of a video from the Olympic Games.
A social network should work for its users, which means it should not act as an instrument for someone else to control or restrict them. That means it should not enter the business of publishing on behalf of moneyed interests.
It is too bad that Weber legitimized the power that was used against him by referring to these videos as "illegal".
Roy Schestowitz reports being censored ("shadowbanned") by Twitter for posting about Twitter censorship.
This kind of censorship is not obvious to the one being censored.
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