Posted 11/17/2024
so i don't think there's any hiding how shit twitter is now. however, there are things that are actively becoming worse and made especially worse within the past week that i want people to be made aware of, and of solutions you can take in order to make sure you're not affected by them.
i am not going to speak to needing to rebuild and audience or following on another platform or maintaining income or whatever. that's not what any of this is about. this is a matter of rights to your own work and person and your safety. i'm not being hyperbolic.
there are two twitter terms of service that have recently gone into effect that i want to bring to your attention: AI training and lawsuits.
there no longer is an option to opt out of AI training on twitter's AI program, Grok. (some people may still have the option but it won't protect you because it's not legally binding, but we'll get to that.) even if your account is locked, it does not matter. Grok will be trained on your photos, videos, and tweets.
what are your options? honestly, to delete everything. that is unfortunately the route that i and my friends have taken in order to protect our work and our privacy.
there are a few ways you can go about doing this, which is straight up delete or deactivate your account. deleting will wipe your account off of the map, and leave your handle up for grabs should anyone one to take it. deactivating will keep your account in a suspended state for 30 days and then proceed with the account deletion process if you are on the wall or just want to make your content unavailable for this period of time.
the route that i have personally taken is to keep my account up, however delete all of my tweets. there's a limited amount you can do with certain services because of the paid twitter API, but here is a video outlining what you can do instead.
the tldr on this is get your twitter archive data, run the provided script in the browser console, give the script's pop up your tweet-header.js from your archive, and let it run. it will delete everything. the person in the video says this and i will reiterate it, be careful when pastings scripts into your browser console, but i an others can verify that this script is safe to run and will only touch your tweets for means of deletion.
this will prevent your work and content from being used for AI training purposes without your consent, and you have your archive to boot so you technically did not lose anything.
now for the lawsuit thing i mentioned. last friday (nov 15th 2024), a new line to the terms of service has gone into effect stating that any lawsuits that will be taken against twitter/X, will have to happen in north Texas courts.
this basically amounts to giving twitter/X the best possible outcomes for itself and continue to harm its userbase since i'd say the majority of users are not based in north Texas.
any lawsuits brought against twitter/X will be facing up against conservative judges and conservative laws.
related to both points, it seems like Musk is going to be some kind of defacto cabinet member with how much favor he's curried with Trump. it's safe to assume that none of your data will be private and can be used against you in some sort of fashion.
the barest safest thing you can do if you plan on maintaining your twitter account is to wipe out all identifying information or data. if you have any say in the matter, do not willingly give these devils any information for free.
you can leave. you can go somewhere else. you can do literally anything else.
follow your favorite creators to their new homes, start a blog, start using an rss reader to follow others blogs. decentralize the internet in a way that matters to you.
but most of all, be honest to yourself. if any part of you could be used as a cudgel against you under the new administration or the bigotry of our country, simply existing and being yourself is itself a radical act. your happiness and security and safety is a threat to these people. so keep existing and surviving.
they said the titanic was unsinkable. and it did. they said that twitter was the town square of the internet, now its too big, too fetid, too rotten, that everyone with any amount of sense doesn't attend it anymore.
there will always be us, even if there isn't twitter. there will be people that keep trying, so you should to.