If you don’t like X, I don’t understand why anyone would use a service like XCancel, which effectively helps maintain the cultural relevance of X.
On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.
It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).
Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.
Public communications from government entities really should be legally required to be disseminated on public forums (ideally properly hosted on .gov domains for easy verification, with RSS feeds) Cross-posting on other platforms should be allowed (with backlink to the .gov), but the .gov should be authoritative.
Unfortunately that requires a level of technical competence that most government entities don't have in the US. Not to mention the ridiculous requirements/processes that are placed on official govt software.
It is 2026, it is not hard to publish a "blog" , if you want to share that same content over social networks that's fine but it should be a requirement that the data doesn't solely live in private walled "social" networks
1 is true: if you control the web server, you control whether the content is published as readable by anonymous visitors.
2 is true: if you disagree, provide the name of that singular corporation. To be clear, you're always relying on corporations, but there's no single gatekeeper.
3 is not the same: if I see something published on "www.water.dcceew.nsw.gov.au" I can be reasonably confident that it is published by my local Government. If I see an X account of @NSWDCCEEW_Water then I need to start looking for context clues, most of which can be faked.
Assuming this is a goodfaith argument for a second !
You can host a wordpress wherever you like with whichever provider you like or even on a potato in a closet. The format and data are open and can be switched to any platform at any time without an account or login.
Technical competence can be acquired as needed. Or more likely the other way around, the government creates an entity that provides this competence to other government entities.
> It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).
What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And you know how I find out more if I want to? I go to their website.
Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company. For many people and the companies or organizations they lead, “everyone uses X/Twitter” and/or “everyone can access X/Twitter”.
We got to this state because, when it was called Twitter, it positioned itself in the market as, exactly this. It’s only now, when there’s been some major changes to it, that we’re paying the piper.
> Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company.
Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.
I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.
>life safety critical announcements during disasters
There is no way twitter is the sole channel of this over say pushing a text message like they do every other week with a silver alert. Just ridiculous to imagine twitter is some disaster tool.
The mountain passes near me have government-run twitter accounts, and it's usually the fastest way to get rich information on their status during storms.
There is a state government website with some of the same information, but it's usually more coarse (sometimes just the open/close status) and updated less frequently.
Some people have Wifi but not cell phone signal. A single tweet has very robust, existing infrastructure, over the “one email per person in a mailing list” style of email; and SMS is DoA when there’s no cell phone.
I can't imagine a disaster apocalyptic enough to take out cell phone service but somehow spare the power and the internet. Seems like one of those things that you would never have to prepare for and be alright.
They have a cell phone on them because they have WiFi in their house, because they have Internet, and they have notifications turned on to their local emergency servers. Since Twitter has a push notifications and a shorter refresh timer, you get messages more regularly that you’ll actually read.
Compare that to email, which you’d get hundreds of messages a day and only care about 3 of them, so you’re not constantly checking.
Edit: dude you live in Australia. Do you know how people in the Bush get their emergency updates that they need to respond to urgently? I bet at least some of them use Twitter or something similar to it. They're not huddled around their weather radio all day (and that doesn't cover everything). Because I had family in rural California and that is exactly how they got theirs. Twitter and Facebook.
Nitter existed well before Twitter first experimented with requiring a login wall to read posts.
People used it because it provided a lighter, cleaner interface, because it avoided Twitter's user tracking, and because it was reasonably useful without Javascript.
(I don't disagree that X has moved beyond the pale, but Nitter was a real boon in the past)
For me, it's just the easiest fix whenever somebody shares a tweet with me, and it fails to load, or shows me some forced login popup. I just click between x and .com in my URL bar, write "cancel", and it suddenly just works.
It's a standard coordination problem: I don't like X, but some discussion happens there (e.g. plenty of competent mathematicians responding to the Navier-Stokes situation) and I cannot force people to move elsewhere.
It suffers from the same fundamental flaw as a self-selected poll: the people most motivated to participate are not necessarily representative, impartial or even particularly reasonable. What appears like a diverse community of fair, objective and well-intentioned people is nothing of the sort.
The community-driven model necessarily means that control of narrative rewards persistence and an aptitude for social engineering. Lift the lid on almost any contentious topic and you will find a fiefdom of committed obsessives who assert seniority, weaponise whatever rules they can, and ultimately wear down anyone with an opposing viewpoint.
Your "counter" is nonsensical - if you are referring to the concept of a logical "red herring", something to distract by introducing an irrelevant topic, this is not that.
Your comment pertained to your (dislike of) use of wikipedia in contrast to the relevant site (X.com).
My comment pertains to both of the relevant websites you had related (wikipedia is no more related to x.com than governments, neighborhoods, etc. that you have brought up), and to the specific reason why x.com came to be (it's current "authorship"), and how the directly related collary (grok) is not the thing you randomly brought up...
Which if there were a red herring here, it would be wikipedia (as it is not a site whose primary purpose is as a commentary website, nor it used in the same fashion)...
But for the topic you specifically brought up, this is entirely relevant, namely, your dislike of another website, and it's direct relation to the general topic at hand.
As for the rest, further nonsense. I can just as easily flip the subjects in each statement and they will remain true...my (factual) statement stands.
You substituted a different question ("who owns the platform") for the one I originally raised ("how its information and narratives are governed in practice"). Call that a red herring or simply a non sequitur; the label isn't important. It didn't rebut the argument.
You're missing the point of those examples. Of course you can reverse them -- and that is precisely my point! Organisational form or ownership tells you very little, by itself, about whether an institution behaves well. My criticism of Wikipedia concerned how authority over contested information emerges and is exercised. "But Wikipedia isn't owned by an evil oligarch" doesn't answer that criticism.
In terms of species-level harm arising from the ways their systems can be abused, I’d rank them roughly as follows. To be clear, I’m ranking a platform’s potential for species-level harm based on its scale and its ability to concentrate, enforce, or algorithmically amplify a shared narrative or behaviour while limiting meaningful challenge or escape.
S-tier: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube [shorts, recommendations]
A-tier: Facebook
B-tier: Wikipedia, Reddit
C-tier: X, YouTube [subscriptions]
D-tier: Most major LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT.
Null-tier: Bluesky, Truth Social, Mastodon, etc. (too irrelevant to have any meaningful species-level effect.)
I can imagine how this analysis might look bonkers at first blush. But I strongly account for how much disagreement is surfaced. Say what you will about X, at least the arguments are visible for all to see. By contrast, the proportion of Wikipedia readers who also read the talk pages to understand active disputes probably rounds to zero.
LLMs such as ChatGPT are problematic because they can reflect and reinforce prevailing views embedded across their source material, most significantly Wikipedia. But their conversational nature provides an important escape hatch: you can challenge an answer, interrogate its assumptions, ask for competing interpretations, and explore multiple perspectives.
You can knowledge it's there, and just not read it. There's lots of links on the internet that I don't click.
I'm sure there are people who genuinely need to receive information that's only on that site, but personally I'm enjoying the feeling of the joy of missing out.
If someone discovered AGI for real, they're going to broadcast it in a lot more places than one social media network. The AI revolution will not be tweeted.
Damn it's almost as if this was a conversation we should have had around 2018 at the latest. Like evident bias in social networks was a real concern all along.
What was the response every single time? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter".
I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this.
Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit too for people to get a clue.
As far as I can tell, the only way Twitter has substantively changed over the past few years is that a small (but non-trivial) number of politically obsessed left-wingers have voluntarily self-exited. Everything else is narrative.
That's what some motivated cable news researchers decided to abuse statistics to say. To be generous, I would say the article makes a significantly stronger causal claim than the experiment supports. The best description is a good exploratory algorithm audit with weak statistical and causal inference.
The analysis rests on just nine synthetic accounts, treats thousands of highly correlated feed impressions as if they provide robust independent evidence, lacks a proper baseline for the political content available on X, and reports no meaningful uncertainty, significance testing or adequately powered replication.
Every social media site is like this now. They fear the scrapers. Most of the people complaining about having to log in on X, they intentionally have no account in the first place because they don't like the site's owner or something.
I say this as part of the exception. The only reason I don't use X is because they banned me for no reason. Probably not the common case.
If you find yourself either ignoring or logging in to view Instagram posts, then yes. But history is path dependent, and this problem mainly occurs on X.
> right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.
> Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.
> The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.
> Over half of the political content shown to our new X users came from accounts categorised as extreme. Of the content from extreme authors, 72% of posts came from right-leaning accounts.
Before X flagged me as a bot for no reason, I had a mostly unused account and can confirm it was showing me a ton of right-wing content. Also lots of stuff related to Elon Musk in particular.
On the flip side, X has less moderation, and it's pretty even-handed. They're allowing a lot of pretty mild right-wing content that Twitter was banning people for.
They didn't release the ranking algorithm as open source, but they released enough of a pretense that people got some hints, and we know that whether a post is by Elon Musk is one of the most important ranking factors.
So journalists ran a study with extremely poor sampling, base rate, and classification methodology designed by left-wing researchers and activists groups (including groups explicitly opposed to X), found the conclusions they wanted to find, and spent the second half of their article decrying the lack of heavy-handed moderation that pre-Musk Twitter used to control speech.
All we can actually derive from that article is that X’s new user recommendation system exposed a small number of near-default, low-feedback, synthetic accounts to more content that left-wing “misinformation” researchers classified as “right-wing”.
Researchers use whatever tools are available, you cannot complaint about imperfect methodology when Elon refuses to provide researchers access to their APIs in order to do a better job at assessing the state of the system.
But for whatever it's worth I had made a new account around the same time and my experience was very similar to what was reported.
Again, Comcast is not an "activist group" and the study literally got awarded by the Royal Statistical Society.
As a cherry on top, they do owe researchers in the EU (though this was done in the UK, I know Sky has an EU presence as well) API access or similar under Article 40 of the DSA.
You’re just being brazenly disingenuous at this point.
The publication is left-leaning, regardless of the distant parent company.
The experts they used to design and run the study were literally left-wing political advocacy groups, and a self-declared left-wing disinformation researcher.
The award is an empty appeal to authority.
But none of those facts matter as much as their obvious selection, base rate, and classification methodology failures.
You keep claiming all these statistical failures, yet you fail to produce evidence for any of them.
I'm sorry, but I trust actual statistics experts more than some guy on HN that makes bold assertions with no proof. To say "nuh uh" and then not back it up with anything is below the standard of debate I expect.
What are these "obvious" failures? Why have you failed to point them out concretely over several comments now? What statistical knowledge do you possess that makes them obvious to you but not to one of the most prestigious statistics organizations in the world? Please, do share with the class.
Your ideological attempts to poison the well by ignoring objective data because you don't like the messenger are not an argument.
To call me disengenous when you spent the last several comments failing to engage with the data and trying to hand-wave it away is ridiculous.
It is getting very hard to assume good intent at this point. This series of comments paints a picture of somebody starting from ideological priors and then trying to bend reality to arrive at their premade conclusion. I would be happy to be proven wrong here, but so far you have failed to do so.
> This series of comments paints a picture of somebody starting from ideological priors and then trying to bend reality to arrive at their premade conclusion.
The irony is palpable.
> I trust actual statistics experts
I listed the issues, but if you need an expert to explain them to you in detail, then perhaps you have neither the statistical nor media literacy necessary here.
1) Selection. Only 9 accounts, no interaction, short period of time. This is not a sufficiently large or realistic sample. That is also not how users interact with the product — for example, things like dwell time directly and materially impact the algorithmic weighting. They specifically avoided any measurable interactions.
2) Base rate. They did not know if the results reflected the base rate across the platform, or algorithmic bias. In other words, did X itself skew right, or did the algorithm.
3) Unreliable classification. Their own experts rated its accuracy poorly, and those are the people most ideologically aligned with the progressive political consultancy that trained the classification model in the first place.
Never mind the “propaganda” claim, which would require showing that not only was the algorithmic bias real (not demonstrated), but that the intent was propaganda instead of — for example — simply the result of maximizing for user engagement. None of which was shown.
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.
Some food for thought from ideology expert Slavoj Zizek.
> I listed the issues, but if you need an expert to explain them to you in detail, then perhaps you have neither the statistical nor media literacy necessary here.
You didn't list any of those before, no need to get personal. You could just argue on the facts instead.
Regarding 1 - You still haven't established why 9 accounts are insufficient. No interaction seems to be exactly the right move if the point is to establish the baseline behavior.
Your argument 2 is kind of self-defeating, don't you think? Either it's a right-wing propaganda machine because its algorithm emphasizes right wing propaganda or it's a right-wing propaganda machine because it's full of right-wing propaganda. I don't see how this argument helps your case that it isn't in either case.
Re 3 - now you're getting back to attacking the messenger. Attack the actual model. Which classification do you disagree with?
> Never mind the “propaganda” claim, which would require showing that not only was the algorithmic bias real (not demonstrated), but that the intent was propaganda instead of — for example — simply the result of maximizing for user engagement.
You haven't established why it would require any of that. As a counterexample, MoMA funded abstract art in the 50s as what they thought was supporting artistic freedom. Turns out it was CIA-funded propaganda. [0] It didn't require any intent from MoMA. It still was a propaganda campaign.
It’s little odd that you replied to the least substantive fact. Disingenuous even.
> "brazenly disingenuous" in such context is a ridiculous and emotive over statement.
“… behavior that's not totally honest or sincere. It's disingenuous when people pretend to know less about something than they really do.”
Rather like ignoring the methodology errors, or the fact that the classification model was developed by an “unapologetically progressive” political consultancy, or that their own experts rated its accuracy poorly.
That's what a lot of the right was banned for pre-Musk, but you thought that was bad, so isn't it also bad when it's done to the left, or is your definition of bad one-sided?
Andrew Anglin, the subject of the first article, was re-banned in 2023 for the same reason that crimethink, inc was banned.
The subjects of the second article are particularly odious right-wing conspiracy theorists and racists that lost their reach, which they believe was connected to arguing with Elon.
That seems like an action you’d be in favor of, and also it counters the propaganda claim — but regardless, their claim that they were shadow-banned, that the cause was direct intercession by Elon, and that the motivation was their merely disagreeing with him, is unsupported by any evidence.
I'm not sure where you got any of that from. Where are you reading anything about the researchers working for Sky News, a Comcast subsidiary (!) being "left wing"? What are you basing your criticism of sampling and classification on?
I provided a study that literally won the Royal Statistical Societies' "Statistical Excellence in Journalism" award [0]. You provided unfounded dismissal and conspiracy. The burden of proof is on your side.
I don't have an X account, and I only use xcancel when someone sends me a link. The reason it's impossible to completely avoid both of them, at least in my corner of the world is that a lot of public organisms seem to think publishing information online exclusively on Twitter is okay, and if you complain they tend to ignore you (I admit I haven't tried complaining about it on Twitter, which seems to be the only thing that works these days).
I've stopped using xcancel even for that. If anything is important enough, it will reach me via other channels. Particularly from any contact who give af ... if they don't it's not important.
Not every org is going to run their own site. I have a similar frustration with companies that post on Facebook or Instagram. I deleted my Facebook account years ago.
I want to read stuff from twitter not because I like the twitter culture but because sometimes something happens and the only place you can learn about it is twitter. Like it or not Twitter is still the most relevant platform for tech related information.
I never liked Twitter and I don't like X as a medium but they were and still are used by others as a communication channel. To partake of what is communicated without having to sign up and/or subject myself to the barrage of nonsense spewed through X I use a self-hosted Nitter instance. This way I get to follow those X links without needing a (real, active) account. For passive X users Nitter offers a far better - lighter, faster - experience than X itself. This makes Nitter (which is what Xcancel - a misnomer since it doesn't cancel X - is based on) especially useful for those who only use X because others used it to distribute information.
There are places like government agencies, public transit org aisations, and similar organisations, which still use it as adhoc quick notification channel. If I want to see if a train route ist interrupted it's the best source. However using it once in a while (not via app or such) has long loading times and nagging screens for sign in, cookie compliance and so on, which makes the whole thing an annoyance ...
Of course the right thing is to lobby those organizations to switch. But that won't help with the immediate situation.
Xcancel helps people migrate away from X, or simply stay outside of it. The fact that X is trying to shut them down, plus the fact that they silo replies and interactions in the first place, should be a good hint that X themselves don't regard that degree of openness to work in their favour.
Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact with a large portion of the online space? Why shouldn't we try to exfiltrate the data from him instead of just letting him hoard it?
And regarding copyright, the same company owns an LLM that was no doubt trained through mass copyright infringement. Maybe the legal double standard is on their end?
> Why should we let one far right billionaire control how we interact
We don't. We let six or seven far right billionares do that.
> And regarding copyright
Copyright of tweets are owned by original authors. Unless you have permission, the copyright infringement which occurs is against the individual, not X.
They have something I want. Usually that’s to check an account for a status update on a service or organization, or view a link that’s been sent to me.
I was fine with occasionally wading into the shit pile for something I want. It’s fine, the door is open and I don’t live there. Get in get out.
But now they want me have a shit address and shit suit and a shitmail. They want me to say hey its me mr shit can you let me in so can I have some of that delicious shit?
Instead I think I’ll just put on a hazmat suit and steal the few pieces I want from their shit pile and get out.
Boycotting them is pointless. Holding to your principals does nothing but hinder your own usage of the internet and does not help bring about the end of X or whoever else. The 0.5% of X users using xcancel disappearing overnight would have no impact.
These monoliths of Internet consolidation are not worth our consideration. Steal their content, block their ads, get on with your life.
No idea how it looks right now, but at some point Twitter started to block reading replies without an account. And sometimes it blocked even more, so you could not follow links to read.
The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
I admit I'm not nor have been a Twitter/X user so am able to look at the situation without a sense of entitlement or attachment.
> The author of the comment higher up is describing a person who is boycotting X because they are strongly against its stewardship and moderation but regardless continues to find ways to indulge themselves in the content produced by users of X, for other users of X.
Yes. Because we have to participate in a society in which sometimes, that's where the info is. Some towns only post their announcements on Facebook/X! Some people prominent on my framework of choice are only on X.
> How else should we describe the position held? It's clearly not entirely principled and veers directly into performative action (i.e. virtue signalling).
Virtue isn't a binary. I can reduce my externalities, even if I can't eliminate them.
>Things like utility companies' and emergency services announcements
I am shocked you get this served via twitter instead of usual service notices for these things. I don't use twitter and I still get these notices and other news.
On a practical level, I’m also wondering what consistent legal standard people want when it comes to things like terms of service and individuals' copyright. It's unworkable to maintain one rule for the awesome people we might like and and another rule for the horrible despots we might not like.