Elon uses state violence against free speech

Since the acquisition of Twitter in 2022, Elon did nothing to change platform's legacy account-based architecture that doesn't provide self-custody or censorship-resistance. Swapping one tyrant for another did nothing to increase freedoms. On opposite, it gave non-tech savvy users a false sense of freedoms, decelerating adoption of freedom tech like Spasm and Nostr. The same as Zuck, Jack, Durov, or other slave tech overlords, Elon tries to lock users inside his centralized monetizable walled garden.

It's worth noting that his efforts to lock Twitter down are nothing new. Elon became rich by working on PayPal, which is a typical centralized fiat-based SlaveFi tech operated from an extremely hostile jurisdiction with KYC and full compliance. He also likes to use state violence against people, his cars are privacy nightmare, and Starlink enforces ridiculous laws across the world. For example, Starlink empowers the global adversary by restricting torrenting, essentially enforcing strong anti-free speech laws based on outrages concepts like copyright, which are usually ignored outside of western police states.

Here is a short timeline of Elon's war on free speech.

2022

Elon bought Twitter in October.

2023

In February, Twitter restricted API access, requiring people to pay for getting tweets over API. That significantly affected privacy-preserving frontends like Nitter, which allowed users to read tweets without ads, trackers, and JavaScript.

Note that data scrapping for LLM training requires significantly more requests than any popular Nitter instance processes, so it could have been prevented by rate-limiting API keys.

2024

Twitter disallowed reading tweets for visitors without an account. As a result, major Nitter instances went down. However, the open source project adjusted and new Nitter instances started proxying requests through real Twitter accounts maintained by instance operators, essentially allowing users to continue reading tweets without ads, trackers, and JavaScript.

2026

In August, failing to restrict free speech via technical means, the world's richest man decided to use the power of the world's largest police state against a bunch of broke open source devs, free speech advocates, and privacy nerds. X Corp sent cease and desist letters demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project's repository. Major instances had to temporary shut down until getting legal advice.

In September, Nitter decided to continue development and instances like XCancel resumed operations.

A few weeks later, XCancel suspended services again due to an undisclosed development in the legal battle.