X Targets Open-Source Nitter Project With Cease-and-Desist
X has sent cease-and-desist letters to the team behind Nitter, an open-source tool that lets users view X posts without ads, tracking, or a login. The letters accuse Nitter of scraping X's platform and demand that public instances be taken offline and the underlying code repository be removed entirely.
Nitter has long operated in a legal gray area, pulling content from X's backend without official API access to offer a lightweight, privacy-respecting alternative. It's popular among developers, journalists, and users who want to browse X without an account or its increasingly restrictive API paywalls.
It's unclear whether the maintainers will comply, fight the demand, or simply let self-hosted instances continue operating outside X's reach, since the code is open source and already forked widely across the internet.