Topic: Twitter blocking adult content to visitors...

Posted under General

I just came back to uploading public content again (not all the time though, but yay!) when I encountered a problem.

Before my hiatus, I can freely access any content from Twitter as long as it isn't restricted or privated, no login required. Now they just suddenly block adult content to visitors, and you must login to their website to view these. They aren't accurate though, as I can still view other obviously adult content, which is weird.

One example is post #3116440. I opened its source URL and now it's blocked! Not in the case of its image URL though. Now when I visited the artist's main Twitter page, I noticed that their several posts are also blocked! So disappointing... :(

As an uploader, this hurts. I see Twitter as a terrible social media website, and I'm not gonna bother registering an account just to see the content and then access its image URL to copy-paste here. But this terrible website is one of the places I can find uncensored (in case of Pixiv) and superior hi-res (in case of FurAffinity) artworks, even though these are JPEGs (lol XD). If there's anyone here who has a way to see their adult content without logging in, please let me know.

monsterbomb10010 said:
One example is post #3116440. I opened its source URL and now it's blocked! Not in the case of its image URL though. Now when I visited the artist's main Twitter page, I noticed that their several posts are also blocked! So disappointing... :(

I can still visit the source URL and view the adult images without an account.

You can't find those accounts through a Twitter search, that's normal. When you do visit the user's page, you are allowed to see lewd images, but you have to click a button on each and every one. That's also normal.

thegreatwolfgang said:
I can still visit the source URL and view the adult images without an account.

Hmm, I should have stated that one clearly... What I meant is that I can view the image URL of the post but not the Twitter post that contain that image URL.

furrin_gok said:
You can't find those accounts through a Twitter search, that's normal. When you do visit the user's page, you are allowed to see lewd images, but you have to click a button on each and every one. That's also normal.

Not in other cases though. I can press 'View' at some posts, but others are just completely shut with this text:

Age-restricted adult content. This content might not be appropriate for people under 18 years old. To view this media, you’ll need to log in to Twitter.

Tested this out right now. It's dumb. If the image is flagged as sensitive or nudity, you see the image Kemonophonic posted. If it's flagged as violence, you get the usual "click to view" thing. I know twitter is twitter and continuously fucks up like youtube, but I really don't think a little consistency is asking too much.

Anyways, yeah I don't like the change. I have a twitter account so it's no huge deal, but I still look at it incognito sometimes. It doesn't do anything substantial anyways. Especially with how popular social media is with younger demographics. This is just a slightly more inconvenient age gate and we all know how effective those are.

monsterbomb10010 said:
Hmm, I should have stated that one clearly... What I meant is that I can view the image URL of the post but not the Twitter post that contain that image URL.:

kemonophonic said:
Twitter posts are being replaced with this and there is no way to view the image.

Like I said, I can still view the tweet and the images in them without any trouble.
I didn't get the warning that @kemonophonic shared, only seeing the typical "The following media includes potentially sensitive content." and then the option to View regardless.

Perhaps it's a region thing since I'm living outside of the US and EU, or just a new feature that is slowly getting rolled out.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Perhaps it's a region thing since I'm living outside of the US and EU, or just a new feature that is slowly getting rolled out.

Just read the section about their "notices" at their Help Center, and oh my fucking hell you might be right. Welp, looks the US/EU guys are the only ones that can upload adult Twitter content right now.

*sad lewd Asia noises*

monsterbomb10010 said:
Hmm, I should have stated that one clearly... What I meant is that I can view the image URL of the post but not the Twitter post that contain that image URL.

Not in other cases though. I can press 'View' at some posts, but others are just completely shut with this text:

kemonophonic said:
Twitter posts are being replaced with this and there is no way to view the image.

Okay, that's new. Still, it's a free site to sign up for. Just sign up and log in.

And use a burner email, and more importantly, never give in to the temptation to tweet. It’s a bottomless pit of worthlessness.

It's unlikely to be a region thing, just either a slow rollout or a new feature being A/B tested (which Twitter does a lot). Personally, I'm in the "can still see it" group, but I'm not holding out hope for that to continue.

And I thought the new "feature" preventing you from scrolling down a profile for more than ten or so tweets without logging in would be the worst thing they did this month.

jfrankparnell said:
And use a burner email, and more importantly, never give in to the temptation to tweet. It’s a bottomless pit of worthlessness.

Or don't and just tell Twitter to not send you emails or start sending them to the spam folder. I never got any random extras after it.

wat8548 said:
It's unlikely to be a region thing, just either a slow rollout or a new feature being A/B tested (which Twitter does a lot). Personally, I'm in the "can still see it" group, but I'm not holding out hope for that to continue.

And I thought the new "feature" preventing you from scrolling down a profile for more than ten or so tweets without logging in would be the worst thing they did this month.

There's a lot of penalties to not being logged in, but, y'know, just log in. It's free. They don't sell your email. You can use a burner account if you're really worried.

Ah great... Now I can see the post again without logging in, along with the ones that are previously blocked shut. I guess it is just temporary and a test for their "new features". I hope they will not do it again, or else...

furrin_gok said:
There's a lot of penalties to not being logged in, but, y'know, just log in. It's free. They don't sell your email. You can use a burner account if you're really worried.

Trusting Twitter, or any other social media after the precident Facebook has set, is the digital equivalent of sticking a fork in an electrical outlet.

furrin_gok said:
There's a lot of penalties to not being logged in, but, y'know, just log in. It's free. They don't sell your email. You can use a burner account if you're really worried.

I actually did that once and, five seconds after creation, my account was locked for "suspicious activity". Then they demanded I hand over my phone number to prove I really existed.

wat8548 said:
I actually did that once and, five seconds after creation, my account was locked for "suspicious activity". Then they demanded I hand over my phone number to prove I really existed.

What the hell did you do, spam retweets and likes immediately? Just respond saying "I don't own a phone, but can confirm through this email that I exist"

Twitter's not an art site, it's closer to Facebook than, say Furaffinity. And as such the content scrolls down the home page with very little to filter the NSFW content. I don't want to see adult content without my consent, but people don't properly label theirs even on non-"AD" accounts.

It's great that they've made some effort to avoid showing random people (especially minors) this kind of content and it's not hard to create an account if you really need to see it.

furrin_gok said:
What the hell did you do, spam retweets and likes immediately? Just respond saying "I don't own a phone, but can confirm through this email that I exist"

I literally did not have the time to do anything. And I did respond and got it unlocked, but there was no mistaking that it was intended as an act of intimidation.

Compared to the hassle-free experience that creating an e621 account with the same email was (and make no mistake, I'm still not happy about the fact that this site now requires you to log in to see some images), it's clear that Twitter has no intention of making things easy for users who can't be identified, targeted and tracked by ads. Like Facebook, the process will inevitably only get more invasive in the future.

wat8548 said:
I literally did not have the time to do anything. And I did respond and got it unlocked, but there was no mistaking that it was intended as an act of intimidation.

Compared to the hassle-free experience that creating an e621 account with the same email was (and make no mistake, I'm still not happy about the fact that this site now requires you to log in to see some images), it's clear that Twitter has no intention of making things easy for users who can't be identified, targeted and tracked by ads. Like Facebook, the process will inevitably only get more invasive in the future.

If the product is "free", you are the product.

votp said:
If the product is "free", you are the product.

Hence minimizing use of said site, and not signing up to hand yourself and your data over to them to add to their stock. Their business isn't going to live or die based on whether they can squeeze a few more users in by annoying them until they give in, just so they can sell my data and try to get me hooked on a service that has been shown to be deleterious to one's mental health. I purposely haven't signed up for Twitter in the nearly 16 years they've been operating, and I don't intend to now.

monsterbomb10010 said:
Just read the section about their "notices" at their Help Center, and oh my fucking hell you might be right. Welp, looks the US/EU guys are the only ones that can upload adult Twitter content right now.

*sad lewd Asia noises*

Oops, looks like it was a slow rollout, I'm getting the age-restricted notices now.
I only noticed something was wrong when NSFW tweets weren't getting embedded on Discord.

*RIP NSFW Twitter embeds on Discord*

thegreatwolfgang said:
Oops, looks like it was a slow rollout, I'm getting the age-restricted notices now.

Sadly I am too. Oddly, it's only for some posts, though. Some NSFW images still have the View link to see it, and others say to log in to see the tweet.

Hopefully something like nitter.net can implement a workaround.

ebea57 said:
I found a workaround to view age-restricted tweet: copy the tweet ID and paste it at the end of this link https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=

How do you get the tweet ID? I'm not seeing any link or other reference to it on affected tweets.

I tried the website you mentioned, Watsit, and it's WAY cooler than mobile Twitter. And yeah, hopefully someday they implement a workaround.

ebea57 said:
I found a workaround to view age-restricted tweet: copy the tweet ID and paste it at the end of this link https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=

I know it's not a perfect solution but maybe someone can make use of it.

It only works if there's a source post URL in an image, though. Anyways, cool!

watsit said:
I'm not seeing any link to the tweet, though. It's just this (as shown earlier):
https://imgur.com/a/PmE6RLr
It doesn't say who made the tweet (which would be a link to the user's page), or the time the tweet was made (which would be a link to the tweet itself).

I think you didn't understand. You copy the tweet ID from the link to the tweet (the number after status) and paste it at the end of this link: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=

So, you do something like this:

https://twitter.com/badwingm/status/1469312473966968833 ↓ 1469312473966968833 ↓ https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1469312473966968833

The final link is: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1469312473966968833
Now you should be able to see the tweet from there.

ebea57 said:
I think you didn't understand. You copy the tweet ID from the link to the tweet (the number after status) and paste it at the end of this link: https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=

I mean when I'm on someone's twitter page. So for example, I start here: https://twitter.com/LycanToshNSFW
I scroll down a little, and I see one of the tweets saying "Age-restricted adult content. This content ...". There's no link to the age-restricted tweet at all, it doesn't say who made the tweet or when the tweet was made (the latter would normally be a link with the tweet ID, if it was there), so there's no tweet ID I can copy.

watsit said:
I mean when I'm on someone's twitter page. So for example, I start here: https://twitter.com/LycanToshNSFW
I scroll down a little, and I see one of the tweets saying "Age-restricted adult content. This content ...". There's no link to the age-restricted tweet at all, it doesn't say who made the tweet or when the tweet was made (the latter would normally be a link with the tweet ID, if it was there), so there's no tweet ID I can copy.

Ok, I get what you mean now. And yeah, there's no easy way to get tweet ID in that case (though it's not impossible, I believe it can be done with the help of a script).

But I don't get one thing, btw. How can you browse Twitter without being logged in? When I do this, it shows me an unskippable dialog to log in or create account every time I scroll down the timeline a little bit :/

ebea57 said:
But I don't get one thing, btw. How can you browse Twitter without being logged in? When I do this, it shows me an unskippable dialog to log in or create account every time I scroll down the timeline a little bit :/

When I get that, I click the Log In button, then on the pop-up asking how to log in, I click the X and it takes me back to where I was and can keep scrolling. It may ask to log in again later, but I can keep doing that to get rid of it. Annoying, but it works.

You can also use Nitter. Just replace a twitter.com url with nitter.net (e.g. https://twitter.com/LycanToshNSFW -> https://nitter.net/LycanToshNSFW) and it doesn't annoy you with any popups or log in requests. I do keep forgetting about using it, though, and there is an issue that it doesn't even show the "Age-restricted adult content." tweets, so you won't know there's any there at all. But since you currently can't see them anyway and there's nothing you can do with them even if you could, it's not a significant issue I guess.

This is probably happening because Germany implemented age verification laws and other countries like UK and Australia are threatening to do the same so twitter made it a global restriction. I hope there's a workaround soon, it's bad enough that twitter can demand a phone number.

ebea57 said:
Ok, I get what you mean now. And yeah, there's no easy way to get tweet ID in that case (though it's not impossible, I believe it can be done with the help of a script).

But I don't get one thing, btw. How can you browse Twitter without being logged in? When I do this, it shows me an unskippable dialog to log in or create account every time I scroll down the timeline a little bit :/

That was only introduced a couple of months ago. Until now, opening a private browsing session stopped that notification from activating for a few days, which was my workaround...

watsit said:
When I get that, I click the Log In button, then on the pop-up asking how to log in, I click the X and it takes me back to where I was and can keep scrolling. It may ask to log in again later, but I can keep doing that to get rid of it. Annoying, but it works.

You can also use Nitter. Just replace a twitter.com url with nitter.net (e.g. https://twitter.com/LycanToshNSFW -> https://nitter.net/LycanToshNSFW) and it doesn't annoy you with any popups or log in requests. I do keep forgetting about using it, though, and there is an issue that it doesn't even show the "Age-restricted adult content." tweets, so you won't know there's any there at all. But since you currently can't see them anyway and there's nothing you can do with them even if you could, it's not a significant issue I guess.

A while back Nitter went down for a few months because they were getting more traffic than they could handle, so they had a page linking to different forks of the site you could use instead. Some of those are able to access nsfw posts currently:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

And unlike the site they scrape from, the Media, With Replies, and Search tabs can actually be accessed without a log in!

penguinempire-dennis said:
A while back Nitter went down for a few months because they were getting more traffic than they could handle, so they had a page linking to different forks of the site you could use instead. Some of those are able to access nsfw posts currently:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

And unlike the site they scrape from, the Media, With Replies, and Search tabs can actually be accessed without a log in!

Thanks for this! Now I just have to wait for my Upload Limit count to come back. XD

Please use the original Twitter link only. Nitter instances are third party sources and aren't guaranteed to remain accessible.

Again: Just sign up. If you really believe the rumors about twitter selling information, then use a secondary email when you sign up. Never use a throwaway email because you might need to reconfirm at some point, just use one that you don't care if it gets flooded.

Once you sign up? You can access the tweets, no problem! Believing that they can somehow trace you is just absurd levels of conspiracy theory, but even then you can use a VPN. The only thing they can trace then (and in this case, probably do) is which in-site accounts and tweets you view. That's how the algorithm knows what to suggest.

furrin_gok said:
Again: Just sign up. If you really believe the rumors about twitter selling information, then use a secondary email when you sign up. Never use a throwaway email because you might need to reconfirm at some point, just use one that you don't care if it gets flooded.

Once you sign up? You can access the tweets, no problem! Believing that they can somehow trace you is just absurd levels of conspiracy theory, but even then you can use a VPN. The only thing they can trace then (and in this case, probably do) is which in-site accounts and tweets you view. That's how the algorithm knows what to suggest.

The thing about them being unable to trace you is somewhat incorrect. There is a fairly well established technique of using the information passed by a user's browser (Fonts installed, screen resolution, computer region, etc.) to identify the same user as they move between pages. This is in addition to a new method for tracking via GPU fingerprinting, where very subtle variances in how a GPU does on a series of short calculations allows for a very high degree of confidence in identifying an individual user.

As this information is very valuable in bulk for targeted advertisements and the like, I would say it is safe to assume that some companies will be already doing this, or in the process of getting this set up.

I suppose what this all means is that people have just got to ask themselves where they draw the line on the tradeoff between anonymity and convenience.

Sorry for this whole spiel, this is just a topic I'm interested in, and I think a lot of people underestimate how many advances are being made in the area of online surveillance.

quenir said:
Stuff

This is the reason you browse sites you don't trust in windowed mode rather than fullscreen, by the way.

mr._spooky said:
Twitter is an absolute dumpster fire, even Tumblr seems sane and sensible in comparison now.

Tumblr banning porn explains both.

The recompression that these sites do is the real trash. At least Tumblr had its raw moment.

wat8548 said:
I just want to know where the hell Furrin Gok thinks Twitter makes its money from.

Read into what tweets you view, who you follow, and what you search for to offer you relevant ads and recommended tweets? Whatever you think they do, nothing's happened to me outside of Twitter based on having a twitter account.

mr._spooky said:
Twitter is an absolute dumpster fire, even Tumblr seems sane and sensible in comparison now.

Still going to continue suggesting people try out NewTumbl. It's Tumblr but without the dumb purge--and also a good rating system instead of "Mature or not".

furrin_gok said:
Oh huh, dug around Twitter's settings, and noticed the Privacy and Safety includes optional trackers, they're just off for me. So there you go. Make your account, check those options, make sure they're off.

"We're not tracking you. Trust us."

The wording there does not inspire trust. "optional trackers", indicating some trackers are non-optional and that only handles the ones that are optional. Which ones? Who knows. Or "allow additional information sharing", indicating there's some information that's going to be shared regardless and that's just for extra/additional information. What information is that? Who knows. It's standard practice to make this wording sound like it means something, but sneak in use of vague terminology like "optional" or "additional" without clarification so they have legal shield for nearly anything if they get caught.

And the fact that you have to turn this off in the first place, that they by default track you wherever you go, even off Twitter, and you need to opt out of having your information and browsing habits shared with third parties, is what makes me want to limit my use of their stuff.

furrin_gok said:
You can't find those accounts through a Twitter search, that's normal. When you do visit the user's page, you are allowed to see lewd images, but you have to click a button on each and every one. That's also normal.

There is a way with user scripts to auto'click' all those but I don't have it handy. Clicking them changes some flag/s, I believe.

Trust often means the opposite in security circles. As in, a point of weakness not something you want to rely on. :D "We maintain profiles even if you never join, because FU that's Y." <-- Facebook should be blocked on all sites if using uBo/Matrix.

Twitter is poor for uploading, anyways. At least Pixiv 'only' has censoring. They still provide raw PNGs (for now). Mastodon-based platform is OK but needs more users. Tumblr was always ever for porn, right (half joking)?

Updated

dripen_arn said:
i've just been using nitter ever since i saw it used in the source link for some art i saw here

Yeah, a nitter instance (there's many) would work, but they A) have traffic limits because API B) Can be blocked at any time by Twitter on a whim :(

https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances

This is the working solution for NOW, but it should be needless to say "Stay tuned for updates"/"Keep checking here". I just learned of Nitter a month or so ago, after last post. Otherwise I would have mentioned it. I forgot to update this topic.

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