Twitter enshittifies away right to stop AI from scraping your stuff

Elon Musk’s years-long efforts to make Twitter (X) ever more unappealing has really picked up steam this week. After announcing plans to let people you’ve blocked still read your tweets—a real boon for the country’s under-served Stalker-American population—folks have now noticed that the company’s terms of service, updated on Wednesday, have now been altered to explicitly grant Twitter the right to scrape your posts for AI training.

To be clear, Twitter was already scraping your posts to help it feed Musk’s bastard brainchild Grok, but you could at least opt out of it. For now, the options that appear to turn off such data scraping (including one that lets you nuke your conversation history, which would presumably serve a more scorched earth approach) are still visible/usable in Twitter’s settings. But the change in the Terms Of Service—you can see it easily by looking at snapshots of the previous ToS from The Wayback Machine—makes it clear that, simply by posting on Twitter,  you’re now explicitly granting a license that

includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type; and (ii) to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals, including, for example, for improving the Services and the syndication, broadcast, distribution, repost, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

All that machine learning language is new, to be clear, and it suggests that we are headed toward more, and less optional, scraping, not the alternative. We can only hope Grok enjoys feeding itself on screenshots of people posting their Bluesky addresses, which have been like half our feeds this week, as the eXodus continues…