The question is, what's going on here? Is this Firefox blocking some path/subdomain/cookie on x.com because it's used by their tracking widget, but the same is also used by some important part of the site itself, so it's essentially a false positive and Mozilla need to adjust the filter to be more specific? Or is the site detecting the ad blocker and purposely refusing to load?
Twitter loads some javascript file from edgecastcdn.net and twimg.com. The browser blocks these loads because they are from third–party domains which is a big risk. Loading a script from a third party exposes anything secret or private on the page to the third party. Of course twimg.com is _probably_ owned and operated by Twitter, but it could be anyone. They’re not even registered through the same registrar, they have different registrant information, etc, etc. One is reported to be in Arizona, the other in California.
This is exactly how information about you is leaked to advertisers. Maybe the scripts you load from those third–party domains are harmless, or maybe they send everything you see and type back to the third party.
There is javascript on the page that detects the failure and puts up the error message blaming the browser. Really the browser is taking a completely legitimate action, and Twitter could get around it by simply hosting all of their javascript on the same domain that you visit. If you visit x.com it would load javascript from x.com. But if you visit twitter.com, it would load the same javascript files from twitter.com urls instead. Or twitter.com could just redirect you to x.com. Either way, the problem would be solved. But by asking you to turn off strict browsing mode, it enables Twitter to load javascript from real third parties that just want to advertise to you.
I know, I was being slightly sarcastic. But on a serious note there’s nothing about the registration info for x.com that indicates that it is owned by twitter.
just like google forcing browsers to send full referrer cross domain by strong arming w3c with chrome. because their business model depends on full referrer cross domain.
xitter decided it's business model depends on third party cookies. so they're strong arming users into enabling it on the browser globally.
everything is simple. there's no complex technological reason for any of those things. it's all access to your data and money.
the browser is the battle ground and they win every single time.
I fully endorse this use. I’ve been using it myself for some time. I’m so sick of newspapers writing “X (formerly Twitter)” everywhere. And “Xitter” has all of the right connotations for the cess pit that xitter has become.
I don't know specifically for X/Twitter, but typically it isn't actively malicious but instead just bad programming. The JS is written in a way that breaks when the <tracking/ad/whatever is blocked> fails to load.
Malice and bad programming are interchangeable in most contexts, one day our industry will learn this but not until a few more CrowdStrikes and a few less Js frameworks, runtimes and crapwares.
This is a complete guess, but it could have to do with the twitter.com -> x.com migration. Still trying to load twitter.com assets, which are now third party.
From the page: "The IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)® specification allows Learning Management Systems (LMS) or platforms to integrate remote tools and content in a standard way."
If you haven't used an LMS ("Learning Management System") it's kinda like WordPress for teaching - teachers create course materials without needing to know HTML.
I'm not super familiar with LTI, but it looks like the company that does this also does the Common Cartridge spec (which I'm more familiar with)
To answer your question:
Let's say that I'm teaching at course at University A using the Canvas LMS. At the end of the quarter the teacher asks the LMS to "Export The Course", which produces a file in the Common Cartridge format (essentially a .ZIP file with XML manifests and any supporting files bundled along with it). Later if you wanted to copy that course into an LMS then you can upload the Common Cartridge format and it should just work (at which point you can copy the course contents, in part or in whole, to the new course).
I'm guessing the LTI is the same idea, but for the LMSs to talk to each other while they're running.
I'm currently on leave but this (LTI) is what we do at work much of the time.
Typically LTI is used to add third party components (or in-house ones) to an LMS. For example we have our own Teams Integration, lecturers can make a Microsoft Team corresponding to any course they teach, their students can see the URL of the team if they've lost it but can't leave or create a team.
Twitter is by far the best source of news and analysis currently. Outpaced only in some areas by niche, usually also crowd-sourced, sites like HN.
A week ago twitter had pictures and videos from several angles of assasination attempt on Trump when media still reported "an incident." The difference is wild. Ditching twitter is like going back from old-school news tv to a telegraph.
Anyway, I have strict tracking protection enabled and x.com loads fine. Firefox 128 on Ubuntu, official snap.
Other media is frustrating because it's always heavily filtered, has an agenda, and always talks like a PR release. It's like they're trying to keep some image of a respectable paper and so have to write in that stupid title - subtitle that repeats the title - first paragraph that repeats the subtitle - 30 paragraphs in complete disorder, half of which are a waste of time format
Edit: someone on Twitter obviously also has an agenda, but it's not hidden behind a supposedly impartial image (NYT, etc.), it's just some guy with known credentials posting opinions
Here's the thing, I agree. But also, you do know that the various news sites have an agenda. It's a fact. And the way you work around it is by reading from multiple sources that have different agendas and form your own opinion based on that.
The random Twitter user though? Who the fuck knows. He might be in just for the lols. Maybe they're just bored. Maybe they're actually knowledgeable. You just don't know.
Agree but if I have to bet on one or the other I'm not putting my money on the Twitter user.
And you can apply the same reasoning to literally everything. You know nothing about this random doctor who's going to perform surgery. Should you perhaps let some other random guy on twitter that claims to be a surgeon do it? After all even doctors from "most respected" universities made some stupid mistakes.
It's good to be skeptical in life, I'm not arguing against it. But at some point you have to trust at least something otherwise it's impossible to go through life.
> Agree but if I have to bet on one or the other I'm not putting my money on the Twitter user.
Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources, moreso than conflicted profit-seeking media outlets. In particular, a lot of them are subject matter experts in a particular field, instead of generalists trying to summarize something they don't really understand or put a partisan spin on it.
There are also more than enough less trustworthy sources. But you shouldn't feel inclined to follow the nincompoops.
> Twitter has millions of users. Some of them are actually trustworthy sources
Some of them are teenagers that pay for a blue "Verified" checkmark with their mom's credit card. Modern Twitter is about as deserving of your trust as an email from a Nigerian prince.
I don’t use Twitter other than – very rarely – following Hacker News links but I still know that being “verified” has no bearing on trustworthiness.
The person you’re responding to comes across as quite media savvy so I’d assume the trustworthy sources they’re referring to are people whose previous posts have a solid track record of being reliable, factual and/or insightful.
Disclaimer: not being on Twitter, I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts – without interference from Twitter’s engagement algorithms. Or if it’s still possible to use third-party software to consume Twitter posts (I used to have an extension that converted Twitter links to Nitter).
> I don’t actually know how easy it is these days to follow a particular set of accounts that the user trusts
You should try it, then. Part of the... uh... "appeal" of Twitter is the algorithmic timeline that suggests content from people you've never seen or heard from before in your life.
The timeline has actually been split into two - "For you", which is suggested accounts; and "Following", which are the accounts you are following. I often switch between the two to take advantage of the difference. Following accounts is as easy as it ever was.
But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting?
I’m not saying there aren’t trustworthy people on Twitter. After all there’s plenty of journalists. But there’s also plenty of shitposters. And random people spewing nonsense.
> But would you agree that if we were to pluck people at random from the journalists population and from the Twitter user base, the first group has a higher probability of returning someone who’s trustworthy when it comes to news reporting?
Eh. When the set "journalists" contains all the people who work for the likes of 24 hour cable news networks and the National Enquirer it's not obvious this is even the case. But the bigger point is that you don't select sources at random from the entire population of Twitter users, you select the ones you've observed have a track record of getting it right.
It's obvious by the sheer number of people in the two groups. There's some 350M users on Twitter. I'd argue that the chances of me grabbing one at random from that group and fishing out a reliable source of information are lower than if I were to do the same from the entire population of journalists.
The bigger point though is that I'd not pick a random journalist either, I'd select one I observed having a positive track record. We're losing track where this discussion started.
The "pick one at random" is not something I'm suggesting people should do as a strategy. You should invest time and try vet people as best as you can; you should never 100% trust anyone; You should always challenge your own assumptions and biases; You should try as much as you can to find multiple sources on the same story if you care about that particular story.
That's an MO i'd suggest. I personally don't care where people find their sources as long as they're doing their search properly. I'm sure there are quality journalists on Twitter. Same is true for most news outlets. I also know there are a shit ton of trolls and shitposters and grifters on Twitter. And that's not true for most media outlets.
> There's some 350M users on Twitter. I'd argue that the chances of me grabbing one at random from that group and fishing out a reliable source of information are lower than if I were to do the same from the entire population of journalists.
The population of journalists has adverse selection because the nature of the industry creates an incentive to attempt to influence opinions rather than merely convey factual information. If you pick one at random you're more likely to get a paid propagandist than you are picking randomly from the population at large.
> I'm sure there are quality journalists on Twitter.
It's not just that. If you take science reporting, for example, even the "quality" journalist outlets will present you with a summary of the results which is often unintentionally inaccurate simply because it's written by someone who doesn't comprehensively understand the research and is under time pressure to publish a story as soon as the research paper is released, even though it's long paper full of domain-specific knowledge that takes time and expertise to digest. Meanwhile they, for whatever reason, consistently fail to link to the original paper, so you have only their inadequate summary.
Whereas there's a decent chance the author of the paper is on Twitter, has posted a short summary of the results which is accurate, and provides the direct link if you want to read it yourself.
And the same with the rest of it. When the major media outlets report the CrowdStrike thing, it's generally along the lines of "an unspecified computer glitch caused flights to be canceled" and then an interview with some rando who tells you to install anti-virus on your PC. When you go somewhere that will give you the full story, you find out the problem was caused by the anti-virus.
> I also know there are a shit ton of trolls and shitposters and grifters on Twitter. And that's not true for most media outlets.
See this is where we disagree. Partisan media outlets employ the lowest quality sources of information, because they're purposely selected to manipulate your opinions. They're not just random rubbish, they're explicitly adversarial to objective truth.
That isn't to say that good journalists don't exist, but they are not a majority of "journalists" to be sure.
Some are pretty verifiable accounts from actual academics, CTOs, journalists, that's the ones I'm interested in. You can get multiple sources on one website with fewer filters, that's what makes it a good source
The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'. Teenagers love to position themselves in such roles due to insecurities, although I don't think anybody is completely immune to this.
Still, don't get why regular folks are so obsessed with getting desperately the news first, unless you ie trade on it or work for Reuters. Life quality is about completely different stuff, but to each their own, maybe its just Sunday chill talking from me
> The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'.
It's not because of lag time, and it's not because it's different from mainstream, it's due to growing frustration with older media that I slowly developed before I even knew about Twitter and my experience following interesting people on there. It's gotten worse since Musk, some have moved to bsky or mastodon, but it's still the best source for me.
I understand your point of view but I don't find your assumption very charitable, there are real reasons for this that have been touched on.
Well, charitable for normal situations IMHO it isn't. Some sort of OCD-ish behavior re info feed. I see it on myself - the less I focus on all crap coming from news, regardless of form or source, and more I focus on my own wellbeing, my close family and friends, the happier I am.
There are truly very few news which are seriously relevant to my life, and I suspect its the same for rest of us. Just because there is a big crowd of similarly-impacted folks I ain't going to normalize such toxic behavior.
Longforms from papers like the Economist actually really interest me, and I look forward to opening them even when my life is pretty happy already. But you need to find non-extreme papers that match your interests and keep reading time under control.
> And the way you work around it is by reading from multiple sources that have different agendas and form your own opinion based on that.
This, especially now that we're approaching the day when everyone could ask their personal AI to build a fake, albeit plausible, image of someone doing something wrong.
Yeah I think the most useful skill we should start teaching is critical thinking. Because it's going to be an absolutel mess navigating the digital space in the near distant future.
That was a good strategy before sites like Twitter existed. Now, I can watch live feeds and info coming in without any journalists filtering it for me, or actually have them adding info while I consume primary sources.
For example, several times in my life I happen to have caught a live stream that was reported on wildly inaccurately by legacy news media. I happened to watch, for example, the "Covington kids"[0] stream because it was trending on Twitter that day. Knowledge of that reporting travesty should be enough to shake anyone from experiencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, and wouldn't have been dispelled by reading several news sites because just so many were involved. Frankly, it was a disgusting and irresponsible response by said journalists and organisations and should lead people to stop reading those publications in their entirety.
That's not the only example, but the idea that powerful "truth seeking" organisations should try and destroy the lives of children because of an agenda and a MAGA hat is an indictment of those organisations. It led to death threats against children.
I'm happy with choosing my own sources of trust, thanks, and it won't be to read from sources that do that kind of thing. I have a thing called basic morality, and encouraging violence against children is a line I'm not willing to cross.
That's why you click on the "Following" tab, not the "For you" tab. Also, how is that any different from any other social media platform? Heck, I just opened Apple News and it recommended me a Buzzfeed article titled, "People are sharing moments where they saw millionaire's spoiled kids get humbled by the real world, and it's a trip".
It isn't any different, that is the point. They are all manipulating super-smart you far more than the NY Times was ever capable of doing. The fact that you think you organically found who to follow is really something.
What would finding someone "organically" look like? Even before social media algorithms were a thing, or even before social media was a thing, information was not laid out in some random fashion, or in a way that made any of it equally likely to reach anyone. Seems like a fallacy to me.
Algorithmic social media streams are the actual Virtual Reality. The algorithm has agenda by design to create engagement. Another attribute of social media is that you are consuming information through personas not just some faceless article. This creates emotional attachment that divorces you from evaluating information in unbiased way.
Twitter also doesn't show me everything, and content is algorithmically curated. And nothing is vetted. So why's that any better? Also, everything? Everything what? "The media" doesn't show me everything for obvious reasons. You can't digest everything. Because this is how "everything" looks like: https://firesky.tv
Well if you didn’t mean that literally then I don’t see the point of your argument. Because then both don’t show you everything and both are selective in what they show you. It’s just a different model and a different set of incentives.
First, it was hours. Second, I'm there more for the tpot/schizo/alternative content. Most importantly though, it's not just a couple hours of difference, but the content is different: raw, with live comments (from the people you follow pulled up), memes, etc.
It's the vibe you used to find on usenet and then blogosphere.
Ok so first it was a matter of timing. Now it's become a matter of vibes and type of content. I get what you're saying, don't get me wrong, I just don't think a site where news are commented by randos mixed with memes and trolls is an important site we have to bend over backwards to preserve. But maybe that's just me.
> when media still reported "an incident." The difference is wild.
The difference is that the media goes to some lengths to make sure the footage they're showing is actually real. Every day on Twitter I see people posting alleged war footage from different conflict zones of the world, and in a non trivial, sometimes majority of cases it turns out the footage is either fake or from some unrelated conflict, or years old but presented as new. The person pointing that out usually has a tenth of the interactions than the original poster.
Twitter is neither providing analysis or news but simply the media equivalent of pornography.
This. Twitter is providing a deluge of unverified info. Discerning media is also getting this, like you, but they're only going to comment on "an incident" because they're expected to mostly have verified stuff first. So much of that deluge is fake war footage, fake narratives, spread by completely partisan uninformed actors. By the time you've discerned what actually happened and what was garbage, so have NYT, generally.
There was an earthquake the other day, people were talking about it on both Mastodon and Bluesky, twitter didn’t even have a mention until after it was over.
Whatever it is on Twitter, it’s a very specific subset of news, usually the kind you also see on breaking news banners in other outlets. Twitter has long been abandoned by everyone of consequence.
There are earthquakes every day in many places, and many of them are inconsequential and hence don't get much of a mention. I know because I live in an earthquake zone and have checked Twitter before to find small earthquakes barely getting a mention because they are like mentioning light rain.
Which earthquake in particular are you referring to?
> Twitter is by far the best source of news and analysis currently.
It no longer is that. The "For You" algorithm is just... bad. You get worse news than from the worst of the most biased/filtered/uncaring/whatever-your-definition-of-bad-is media.
So if I understand correctly, this puts x.com under the same entity as twitter.com so third party cookies are allowed between x.com and other twitter sites?
Firefox partitions (and soon blocks) 3rd party cookies by default. That means they can't be used for cross-site tracking. Also not across different top level sites belonging to Twitter / X. The entity configuration for ETP does not change anything here.
The bug we fixed was in ETP, an older mechanism in Firefox, which blocks cookie access for known trackers, based on a list. Only for that mechanism we consider a hand full of domains by Twitter / X to be the same party. This is so we e.g. don't block their CDN if you're on x.com. We still block them on sites not belonging to Twitter / X.
This is especially relevant for ETP strict which does not only block cookie and storage access, but also blocks 3rd party loads from known trackers altogether. If we block Twitter's CDN on x.com the site breaks.
> The only thing keeping twitter relevant is the fact that you keep opening the website/app.
It's still big on anime-style artists, sadly. At least in my bubble.
Mastodon had its chance, MissKey had its chance, BlueSky[1] had its chance, but none caught on.
Trying to commission good anime-style art without having to create a Xitter account has been difficult[2] for a while. Last time I searched, artists either said "DM me on Twitter", or had an email address but weren't open to comms at that moment.
Nowadays there's a few invite-only platforms (owned by shady companies) that makes all this easier, but only works if the artist has been invited there already.
[1]: While writing this I couldn't even remember this name and had to pause ~20-30 seconds until it came to me.
[2]: My search was limited to "artists who also stream" to reduce the chance of scams, so that filtered out a lot from the beginning.
I think Twitter will probably remain popular for a long time, especially for people with a more right leaning perspective on the world. That's not really the people I associate with, and it probably needs to be mentioned here that I'm Danish. Which matters because the sort of people who post right leaning stuff here are kind of your crazy uncle on Facebook kind of people. Which means that Danish Twitter is slowly becoming a like an actual Facebook feed where the only people who post are the ones you'd likely associate with if you're here on HN. Even if you're conservative, because it's just so crazy and hateful.
I personally wish people were heading for Mastodon. I especially think that our institutions should operate Mastodon instances on their own, so that an American tech giant can't decide to "cancel" a Danish politician as an example. I mean, I don't agree with anything our far right does on social media, but the concept of a foreign tech giant being able to ban an elected Danish official is still sort of crazy. Anyway, people are going to Threads for the most part.
Note that this is a perspective from my little point of the world. Though some of our major news media have decided to ditch Twitter, as well as closing their posts on Facebook to comments.
I love this comment, you are absolutely right.
If every country/government would use the fediverse to enable free speech, and maybe even promote it, that would be a big step forward.
Sometimes I'm a little embarrassed about just how readily Danish politicians and news media have adopted the large tech companies. I know it's related to users, but it's also sort of an egg and the hen situation / bad spiral where it would be nice if they actually put ideology/democracy first.
My good faith take on it is that it might indeed be the case in Denmark (which is where the grandparent comment user is from). Though Denmark’s twitter culture/userbase breakdown doesn’t seem likely to to me as being representative of the larger twitter.
And also, I totally agree with you that this is definitely not so clear-cut in the case of North America and Japan (aka the two largest countries on Twitter/X by their userbase).
Let's be honest, the general public isn't using Firefox, isn't using x.com and has never heard of hacker News and if taught, they'd be afraid you were trying to scam them. We live in a pretty deep filter bubble.
Absolutely agree on that and I personally always try to keep in mind that HN is a weird bubble when it comes to tech but especially when it comes to things related to either money or society.
There is a solution, but don't use it, use mastodon:
In the settings, enable Firefox containers. This allows you to seperate the cookies of X from all other sites. Also install uBlockOrigin to block all trackers on X itself.
Mastodon doesn't have a fraction of the ground sources that Twitter has. You go to Twitter because that's where the people who know shit and tell you about shit are. It has nothing to do with Twitter itself. It's just network effects.
I get why you're annoyed at Twitter (Elon) - I am too, and I still call it Twitter - but there just doesn't exist anything like Twitter. It's the only place where you can ask CEOs and CTOs questions directly. Where you can learn about what is actually happening on the ground in Ukraine from first hand reports from people who are there. Where you hear subject matter experts debating strongly in favor and against all matter of topics. It's sad that it's the only place like it, but it is.
I've disliked Twitter since way before Elon acquired it. And I actually really like Elon as a person, even if I disagree with a lot of things that he's doing with Twitter, because I didn't really care about Twitter to begin with.
Fundamentally, what I don't like about Twitter is the low signal-to-noise ratio. Even if you try to curate the people you follow, Twitter will find a way to push useless stuff in front of you, and even the people who post interesting stuff tend to post pointless stuff from time to time because of the prevailing culture in Twitter.
And I also don't assign a lot of value to accessing ground sources in real time. If anything, I think people care too much about being up to date on everything.
That's the problem with Firefox these days: The management has been so bad that the market share tanked and now market actors can afford to block FF users who are privacy conscious without risking a big outcry.
In fairness, Strict Tracking Protection is not a Firefox problem; it is very clearly a Firefox feature. The problem is the sites. X is not really an important site anyway.
no, the problem is that sites can _afford_ to block firefox, because their share is low enough that they can take the hit.
What we need to do, as tech evangalists, is to push the marketshare of firefox higher, so that they cannot be ignored by sites, due to significant traffic. This is how the open internet can preserve both privacy and control of the computing environment.
if your friends and/or family isn't using firefox (this includes mobile), nag them to switch. If you are a tech support for your extended family, push firefox onto them (and install adblock while you're at it).
If you control a company's IT infrastructure, push firefox as the default browser, over chrome.
The internet is repeating the microsoft IE days with chrome, but without the shittiness that made chrome a possible barrier breaker (chrome is good enough that most people aren't complaining).
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
Management has been so bad that Firefox is hard to recommend now. Servo is a great engine but the company behind it isn't earning support and I think it's not going to last. I'll keep using Firefox forks until they don't work, but I won't support Mozilla by using their product directly anymore.
why force a shit website to allow us to view it? X is a cess pool of miss-information, over-selling, over-hyping, and generally the worst the internet has to offer. At least 4chan wears its degenerate nature on it's sleeve.
Nobody's defending X. The point is that it doesn't matter that FF has strict privacy controls if sites can afford to just...not support FF. Its market share will dwindle to zero and privacy will be dead.
FWIW it seems like the browser market is shifting away from third party cookies anyways, so I'm not sure this is a huge issue.
yep this is why cracking open ios was a mistake, especially for the android crowd who’d never be caught dead owning an iPhone anyway.
there was barely a slope to begin with, you’ve got chrome in a majority and safari in a minority and then Firefox as a rounding error. Obviously if you crush safari, google is just gonna go mask-off full-manifest-v3 and plenty of other sites would be happy to follow. it was obvious from the start, people were just happy they finally got a legislated “win” to the android/iOS debate.
“Don’t be evil” was dead for at least 10 years, and people pay lip service to acknowledging this and then go right on acting like google has their best interests at heart anyway.
The trouble here is that we're dealing with a concentrated market and neither Google nor Apple are selfless philanthropists. "We need Apple to protect us from Google" only leaves you wondering who will protect you from Apple. What we need is for both companies to be broken into a dozen or more pieces so none of them has market power in anything anymore.
My hypothesis on this is that the zeitgeist has moved on from microblogging. Post Muskification, the whole thing fragmented into Mastodon / X / Threads, and no new leading platform emerged because the kids are all on Tiktok anyway. You can't find your friends on microblogs anymore. Meanwhile, professional conversation has migrated to LinkedIn.
> If important people would just quit fucking using it, it wouldn't be an important site.
Yeah, and if everyone would just agree to pinky swear to never engage in wars again and then fully disarm, we would achieve eternal world peace. All they gotta do is just stop doing those things.
Unfortunately, things don’t quite work as simply as the way you imagine they do in the real world.
Yes, but now I can’t convince my family to use Firefox because it makes part of the internet unusable which is a deal breaker to them.
Doesn’t matter if it’s the sites that are the problem, Firefox has lost momentum to such a degree that sites don’t care anymore. So they should tread carefully with features like this.
Firefox taking a hard nose approach here makes it impossible to use this on parents / grandparents computers to help keep them safe.
I don’t mind losing Twitter… but I can’t speak for others in my family. Just sucks. But on popular sites that run blockers, there should be like a little pop-up that says, “Give me access, and let this dumpster fire burn.”
I think back in the day when DRM was being introduced, Firefox refused to implement it, which caused many people to just switch to Chrome or Internet Explorer.
So even when they still had a considerable market share, these kind of stances may actually be detrimental to their user base.
I don't think most people in the world would agree with your definition of important. Perhaps you believe that's a good thing anyways. Not sure where I was going with that.
The jury is still out, but there are a lot of articles that are claiming that social media is harmful. Adds stress, harms mood, contributes to anxiety and depression.
The threat to privacy is well documented.
It's enough for a some people to consider such websites as not important, at least to them.
If anyone has a problem where Twitter does open for them on Firefox, I found the LeechBlock extension to be very useful. Took less than a week for the muscle memory of opening it to go away.
Unfortunately, the latest build of Firefox Focus for iOS — what ought to be Safari plus all of the good parts of Firefox’s tracker blocking — seems to now allow x.com to open. I’ve also started seeing ads where they were blocked before (e.g. theguardian.com.)
I have strict enabled and I have no problem accessing. I even switched off, back on, and restarted the browser. On Mac Air M2 with FF 128.0 FWIW
Other users also noted Safari doesn't load and I couldn't reproduce.
Edit: I guess maybe a good context for a friendly reminder. You can use revanced to edit the Twitter APK and you can hide adds and sanitize sharing links
(dear god, tracking links are so ridiculous sometimes. Am I the only one who is annoyed when I get a text that's a single link and is like 10k characters? With how much time and money these companies spend on UX I'm surprised this is okay. Seriously, can you all stop doing this? I know some users here are the same people in charge of design)
Firefox Focus works great. I have it set as the default browser in iOS and use it for browsing sites and opening pages from Feedly or other applications. As soon as I close it, say goodbye to cookies and all tracking info. It's like a private browsing browser.
If I need to go to a site and log in, then I use Firefox with standard protection (and then use the built-in password manager). But I do 95% of browsing in mobile that I want private, so FF Focus is a gift.
Everyday theres some entity I used to look to Twitter to see news about them, and then I find out they decided not to pay some multiplier of tens of thousands of dollars a month. If I can't use Twitter on Firefox now, thats fine.
all x/twitter links have been login-walled for me for quite some time now, probably since around the time Elon took over, so I just stopped clicking any links or visiting the site entirely... since I literally can't if I wanted to anyways (I refuse to make an account and nitter stopped working).
I suspect my account got hacked, but I was able to login and just delete it. Did not think about it, but now if I make a new one with my phone number it errors out on the phone part.
Are you suggesting that, in respecting people’s right to have opinions GP doesn’t like, GP must make an account and, in their view, endorse those opinions? Or are you suggesting that in merely not liking or endorsing those opinions, GP is somehow denying their right? Does this just apply to Twitter, or should GP also join every forum allowing public signup, to give fair and balanced attention to each of their respective viewpoints?
Using a service that doesn't suppress some opinions you don't like is not an endorsement of those opinions. Or else you'd better figure out whether it's easier to cancel your home internet after you no longer have a phone number or the other way around so you know which one to cancel first.
Twitter does suppress opinions though. Go on there and criticise Donald Trump or Israeli policy in Gaza and see how quickly you get shadow banned.
It probably works for liberal causes too. A few years ago criticising Jeremy Corbyn could get you shadow banned.
I think any subject where you get a whole community sharing your heresy with each other and mass reporting you will suffer...except somehow the far right seem to be able to stay in my timeline despite my best efforts....because Twitter wants to trigger me.
Their shadow banning system is and always has been just completely broken. It's probably the single most broken part of the site.
A major problem with it is that the site is organized by user, so if you reply to someone then it's disproportionately their followers who see it. The quickest way to get shadow banned, then, is to try to debate zealots, because by doing it where they congregate they'll mass report you for contradicting their dogma and then you get shadow banned.
It's not about what the dogma is, which is why everybody thinks the site is biased against them. They see reasonable people they agree with getting shadow banned, and yet tons of buttheads don't because they are mostly congregating with people who agree with them and the feed then showing their posts to random people doesn't get them shadow banned because most random people aren't zealots who report non-abusive posts just because they disagree with them. The algorithm is just asinine.
You’ve twice focused on contradicting an opinion I did not express, but you haven’t told me how it relates to the questions I posed. It’s quite clear you disagree with the other person about whether signing up for Twitter is an endorsement of anything in particular. So are you saying that to imply that you do think they’re obligated to sign up for Twitter? What does your point have to do with my questions at all?
One can acknowledge that they are legally permitted to say whatever deranged crap they like, without necessarily having to walk amongst them.
You can, in general, in democratic countries, say more or less what you like (some exclusions apply). However, you can’t generally compel others to listen to it.
The beef people have with Twitter after the Musk takeover is that it has objectively gotten worse at upholding free speech ideals, even as its new owner claims that doing so is one of his main reasons for taking over the social media company. Pre-takeover, the company was generally considered to be the best of the major outfits in standing up to censorious dipshit politicians [1], routinely challenging government attempts to enforce censorship on social media.
But since the takeover, there has seemed to be a rather partisan tinge to its attempts to challenge government censorship: the company has notably caved to authoritarian regimes (like Turkey) where it used to challenge it, although it does tend to remain resolute in opposing leftish censorship attempts. Furthermore, the company has gone after people for saying ugly truths about the company [2], going so far as to encourage certain right-wing governors to investigate those people for criminal actions.
The patently obvious mismatch between the free speech rhetoric and the censorious actions is the key thing here, not merely the (perceived) odiousness of the opinions on display.
[1] Do note that being censorious dipshits is a thoroughly bipartisan activity.
[2] Like, they literally admit that what was said is true in their own legal complaint, which just torpedoes everything from day one, without the respondent having to say anything!
What we really need here is some anti-censorship technology that makes it so an authoritarian regime that tries to block its political opponents, fails. Make the ultimatum "block these accounts or we block the whole site" toothless. Have every major site using it by default so you're not just blocking Twitter but also Facebook and YouTube and Office365 and Wikipedia, and it acts as a generic VPN that allows anyone anywhere to access anything else their country tries to censor.
In theory "just use a VPN" already does this, but it should be built into the browser so it happens automatically and unsophisticated users don't have to do anything to make it happen.
Not only that, the necessary resolution to the paradox is inherently narrow.
Suppose you have some fools who assert that their opponents' ideas are too dangerous to be heard and have to be censored. Actually doing this is itself too dangerous to allow because once the censorship is in place it would be used to quash dissent and suppress the truth and people would be punished for challenging the prevailing dogma, even when they're right.
But to prevent the harm you don't need a system to prevent people from proposing the harm, you need a system to prevent them from enacting it. It doesn't require censorship, it requires a robust system of checks and balances for protecting fundamental rights, so that the people who propose censorship or violence are thoroughly incapable of bringing them about.
I totally agree. The problem is that we don't have such a system, and as a result, the proposition of harm is in itself already a credible threat and therefore harmful. Personally speaking, to reduce that harm, there's not a lot I can do to make these propositions less credible, so I'm left with trying to give these threats less of a platform.
I will note that from my perspective it is a logical conclusion that the insufficient policing and regulation of violence (and tools of violence) in the US in particular is directly detrimental to the expression of free speech.
> The problem is that we don't have such a system, and as a result, the proposition of harm is in itself already a credible threat and therefore harmful.
But we also don't really have an airtight system for censoring people we don't like, and we certainly shouldn't build one.
When you have to make a change from the status quo to get what you want, make the good change, not the ugly hack someone is promptly going to use against you as soon as you turn your back.
> I will note that from my perspective it is a logical conclusion that the insufficient policing and regulation of violence (and tools of violence) in the US in particular is directly detrimental to the expression of free speech.
Eh. "Tools of violence" are largely a red herring. The tool of violence for a lynch mob is rope. The most common tool of violence for acts of terrorism is explosives, which can be made from the stuff in the average garage or kitchen. You don't get there by banning rope or cooking oil, you get there by deterring would-be murderers with the threat of prosecution.
Notice the circumstances under which these things happen. The first is when the government isn't prosecuting the offenders for acts of violence, e.g. the KKK in its heyday. The second is when the offenders are zealots or otherwise mentally ill and thereby undeterrable, e.g. religious terrorism or lone wolf mass murderers. The first, then, is easy; you prosecute them and they're deterred.
The second is extremely difficult to eliminate, because what are you going to do, institute a police state? Try to restrict access to elements necessary for human life because a chemist could make them into a weapon? But it's also rare. It's not the real problem.
The real problems, in terms of fatalities, don't work anything like most people think they do. The large majority of firearms fatalities in the US are suicides and accidents. Then the people who use a partisan frame or think every problem looks like a nail will still argue that you could get somewhere by banning guns, but since that doesn't pass, a realist might want to direct their efforts to things like improving mental health services or subsidizing gun safes.
But then we're into politics. If you subsidize gun safes or similar and that actually reduces the number of kids playing with daddy's guns, you can't run on fixing it anymore. "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
If majority is overly tolerant of vocal "jerks", some dissenting voices get self-censored due to not wanting to engage in such a discourse, effectively limiting their freedom of expression (the pressures they expect to experience if they express themselves freely are too much for them to handle).
Obviously, this does not stop other dissenting voices to be heard, but in practice, "jerks" have more persistence and thus end up "winning" by being more vocal and enduring.
So it's certainly a tricky balance to aim for, and there is really no "right" line to be drawn.
This is true, but has no bearing on posters that command neither my endorsement not my respect.
You get my endorsement if I agree with you. You get my respect even if I don't agree with you, provided you don't post lies and nonsense, AND are amenable to rational argument.
lol, not true. You get -4 points at the max. I downvote many stupid comments a day and the hordes just keep coming. Look at all the so-called "researchers" complaining about "open weights" in all the AI threads for exhibit A.
I feel like this is sheer incompetence on Twitter’s part. Some ad blocker I have on my iPhone stops Twitter from working and has for several months. It hasn’t prevented
* Me seeing adverts on Twitter
* Me being tracked by Twitter.
It’s yet another half-assed change in Twitter and it turns out that the technical incompetence of it has been my final straw. I’ve been trying to kick the habit for years but Twitter have finally done the job for me.
eta: iirc my original account number was in the 100,000's. I used the platform since I was sending to 40404 and getting tweets from friends by sms until melon husk bought it. I was a big fan. It's become a pathetic shadow of itself.
Ooooooh, now this is funny. I thought twitter just garden-walled itself like all the social networks do to be essentially intranet. I've not been on twitter since(since, you know, I can't see anything). Now i learn it is a cookie issue. Haha, well. Nothing o value was lost.
That Firefox setting doesn't disable Javascript. I use it on a Firefox fork for Android and about the only noticeable difference I've seen is sites aren't given the `prefers-color-scheme` value, so dark themes can't be auto detected.
It also does a few other things, such as reporting your timezone as UTC instead of the real value. It’s an attempt to reduce the number of things that sites can use to distinguish you from other users.
Social media trackers, Cross-site cookies in all windows, Tracking content in all windows, Cryptominers, Known and suspected fingerprinters.
I wouldn't wanna use a site that relies on any of the above to function anyway.