I'm gonna guess it often isn't even their content but is user content they are protecting. So, sounds like a big subsidy/protection racket for Twitter or whatever to train on their users' public content but not let others.
The "platform" that Twitter is restricting access to is a website, with a bunch of content put on it by users of that website. IANAL, but I don't see what rights to that data could possibly be claimed by a third party.
primarily, just seems like the government's pulling the 230 protections offered online platforms "safe harbor" for their user's actions. presumably this opens up twitter to all sorts of liability, such as when a user uploads copyrighted or illegal materials. not an internet lawyer or anything but that's my take.
It's arguably stealing from the people who posted on twitter (because twitter got permission and nitter didn't) but most people who post on x/twitter want their content to spread as much as possible, and don't benefit from twitter advertising anyway.
My bet is on some kind of client/marketing platform that all these accounts gave write permission to.
Edit: I stand corrected, many other comments mention that the offending tweets appear to be posted from the web app, so this suggests an issue within Twitter itself.
Isn’t this sort of what Twitter is trying with the $8/month thing? Forcing a cost to increase the barrier to posting as well as tie it to a human to go after when they do bad stuff.
Twitter created a special rule [1] for public officials who violate their Terms of Service. They feel there's a genuine "public interest" in being able to see (and respond to) these communications, even though they would not normally be allowed on the platform.
Are people aware that there are two classes of users on Twitter, subject to different sets of rules? Twitter hides this fact, for some reason, but it's something that ought to be glaringly obvious to anyone viewing any of a user's tweets.
This is no doubt the outcry they are hoping for, with the intent being to open it up fully to everyone qualified to be a Twitter user. The exclusivity is just to build hype and cachet for PR purposes.
And...? It's their platform. They pay to run it. And it may be news to you, but they already are deleting tweets that violate their policies. They delete and shut down whole accounts for violating policies.
I do not have twitter but based on this HN discussion here of the article it seems a lot of people are not aware of this functionality. I would say they have poorly advertised their settings and functionality which I believe is deliberate to obfuscate privacy settings as well.
Having access to some is not the same as having access to all. Rate limiting , or restricting to ones I am managing and approval processes are pretty easy . It does not like Twitter is doing any of that .
YouTube does exactly this as well. In fact, some YouTubers have had emails demanding money or they’ll flood YouTube with copyright infringement notices on their videos and so lose their income.
This is nothing to do with Twitter choosing to do this to Trump, this is all about how the system works.k
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