Request for Comments: Twitter/X Bridges on social.coop
Erik Moeller
Public
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This is a request for community comments regarding Twitter/X bridges on social.coop, prior to organizing a formal vote on the matter.
Background on Twitter/X bridges
Summary:
Twitter/X bridges allow any content from Twitter/X to be mirrored into the fediverse.
Because of Twitter/X's current stance on moderation, this includes content in severe violation of our code of conduct.
In addition, mirrored accounts from Twitter/X show up in search results, creating much potential for confusion.
Full background:
There are several so-called "bridges" that mirror all posts someone makes on Twitter/X to Mastodon. These bridges have been around for years and are in various states of functioning. https://bird.makeup/ is a prominent one that is currently operational.
To use a bridge, you follow an account from a bridge (e.g., [email protected]) and all their future Twitter/X posts will show up in your feed and the federated timeline.
For example, here is the social.coop version of the notorious "Libs of Tiktok" Twitter/X account that has been used to harass countless people. Nobody on our server needs to follow a Twitter/X account for content to show up in the federated timeline, or in a profile search -- it's enough if someone on our server follows someone who boosts such content.
Even a year ago, before Musk's changes to the site, these bridges were widely defederated (this list from 2022 counts 30 instances that have defederated beta.birdsite.live). Now, Twitter/X has made it abundantly clear that it not just tolerates extremist content (including, e.g., Hitler veneration), but that the site owner actually agrees with much of it.
Beyond our code of conduct, these bridges also lead to confusing search results.
Search for a username like "Jimmy Wales", and you'll see three false results -- all Twitter/X bridges. It's even worse when the person no longer uses their Twitter/X account, but the confusing bridge results still show up in the search -- effectively, they cannot leave Twitter/X behind even if they've moved to Mastodon.
A decision for social.coop
Earlier this year, the community voted strongly in favor of limiting or suspending accounts on Meta's Threads, which does not in fact federate yet.
In contrast, Twitter/X bridges have been operational for years and remain accessible from social.coop. Unlike the foreshadowed Threads support for ActivityPub, these are one-way bridges, and it's unlikely that users on social.coop are going to be directly targeted by way of a bridge. However, they are definitely a vector for general hate speech, which is against our code of conduct.
We could structure a vote very similarly to the one in the Threads poll:
Limit Twitter/X bridges (stops posts from appearing in federated timeline)
Suspend Twitter/X bridges (prevents following as well)
Do nothing about Twitter/X bridges
For the avoidance of doubt, any such vote should of course have no bearing on bridging with BlueSky, which has its own moderation policy quite different from Twitter/X, or on bridging with any other platform.
Before organizing such a vote, after consulting with the Community Working Group and with input from @Sam Whited, I'd like to invite broader feedback from the social.coop community:
Do you currently rely on these Twitter/X bridges and would you be impacted negatively if they were limited or suspended?
Beyond limiting/suspending, are there other options we should consider in a possible vote?
I propose that we let the discussion continue until Monday, January 15 before drafting a poll, to give everyone time to weigh in.
Sam Whited Wed 13 Dec 2023 3:44AM
@Erik Moeller yes, sorry, I actually checked and I was also wrong about search for messages as well it seems. Looks like posts and the like would show up in search they just wouldn't be visible in the federated timeline (or presumably the local timeline if they were boosted and would otherwise show up on it).
jonny Fri 15 Dec 2023 11:24PM
@Sam Whited we should fork so we can fix things like this :) making limits hide accounts wouldnt be too hard
https://www.loomio.com/d/P4rSpyj3/request-for-comments-twitter-x-bridges-on-social-coop/5
Sam Whited Sat 16 Dec 2023 2:57AM
@jonny I am not on the tech team, and can't speak for them, but having maintained a lot of software and administered a lot of machines before my opinion is that the only thing you get by forking is regret :) maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon…
Justin du Coeur Tue 12 Dec 2023 1:31PM
As others have said above, limiting seems like the appropriate move, at least as the default policy.
Suspending is both extreme and (it appears) unnecessary in the general case. There may be specific bridges that should be suspended (because they are sucking in the hate speech uncritically), but given the reality that there is still a lot of valuable content on Twitter that (sadly) doesn't yet exist in the Fediverse, and the presence of bridges that seem to be acting responsibly, a blanket ban looks to be counter-productive.
M. Page-Lieberman - @[email protected] Tue 12 Dec 2023 5:32PM
Edit: Please ignore this comment I had misunderstood, and Sam helped me out.
I’ll leave a new comment on the merits of this proposal below.
Do you currently rely on these Twitter/X bridges and would you be impacted negatively if they were limited or suspended?
No, I do not rely on them, and I generally detest them.
Beyond limiting/suspending, are there other options we should consider in a possible vote?
Those options seem sufficient to me, and I look forward to voting to suspend these mirrored posts, which AFAICT are made in search of high engagement over drama over on Twitter, yet where the people that spam Mastodon with them, generally ignore any attempted conversation over there.
Sam Whited Wed 13 Dec 2023 3:40AM
@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop For what it's worth, I think you're talking about something else, not what this thread is about. These are not people mirroring their Twitter posts onto an account on a fediverse server for engagement and then not checking it or responding. These are normally third parties creating bridges that allow you to subscribe to any public account over on Twitter without that Twitter account having a corresponding account on a "normal" fediverse server. The people who's accounts are being subscribed to by the bridge don't even know it's happening most likely, and do not see any additional follows, likes, or boosts as a result.
People mirroring their posts and not engaging on the fediverse is a separate topic, and you can likely just block them as an individual account action; they'll all be on separate servers and the like and it's not really something we can do anything about as a moderation team except on a case by case basis.
Item removed
M. Page-Lieberman - @[email protected] Fri 22 Dec 2023 10:34PM
@Sam Whited Hi Sam. You're right, and I was wondering if I was confusing it with that. Thank you. So, yesterday, I sent many messages to people on Twitter to tell them that I was leaving the Nazi (Twitter) site and to ask them if they were on Threads or Mastodon, so I could continue to follow them. Many were not and had no intention of leaving Elon's toxic platform. I'm now considering using this bridge service, so I may continue to follow such folks, but I'm also wondering about privacy and consent concerns.
Jonobie Ford Tue 12 Dec 2023 6:25PM
I follow several X bridges that are for weather or disaster information in my area. So I'm definitely not interested in suspending/defederating/banning or making all of them hard to follow. As someone else said, there's still a lot of valuable content on X that isn't elsewhere.
I'm fine with limiting them, though, if we don't want them cluttering up the federated timeline.
Erik Moeller · Tue 12 Dec 2023 4:24PM
@Sam Whited I don't think that's true for profile searches, unfortunately (that's how limiting still allows you to follow accounts).