X sent Nitter a cease-and-desist. Then it went after the source code.
When Elon Musk’s X sent cease-and-desist letters demanding that Nitter — an open-source alternative front end for the social media The post X sent Nitter a cease-and-desist. Then it went after the source code. appeared first on The New Stack .
Elon Musk's X sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter, an open-source alternative front end for the social media platform, demanding permanent shutdown of its instances and removal of its source code repository. While Nitter.net was the main public instance, the code's open-source nature allowed other developers to run independent instances.
X's demand for the repository aimed to control access to its service, even though they couldn't control the code developers used. Nitter once allowed public X posts without an account but stopped working in 2024 when X shut off guest access. Nitter later returned online by using real X accounts, which meant relying on X accounts and their rules.
X accused Nitter of scraping data, accessing accounts, and session tokens, and violating its API, citing the Lanham Act and Section 33.02 of the Texas Penal Code. GitHub's code removal standard requires identifying copyrighted material and explaining how the code circumvents the technology protecting it. A similar issue occurred in 2020 with the YouTube-dl project, which GitHub removed after a Section 1201 complaint but later restored and changed its complaint handling process. As of now, Nitter remains on GitHub, archived and read-only.
Written by urgent.news from The New Stack's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
