X sends cease-and-desist letters to open-source Twitter reader Nitter

Nitter, an open-source project that let people read X posts without logging into or even opening the X app, has received cease-and-desist letters from X demanding it shut down. The news was shared via a brief message posted to the project’s website, following X’s earlier attempts to knock Nitter offline through technical means. The service also powers other sites, including XCancel, that let people view X posts directly.

This isn’t X’s first attempt to shut down Nitter. In 2024, Nitter’s flagship instance, Nitter.net, went dark temporarily after X rolled out new API restrictions. Nitter worked by fetching public X posts and stripping out ads, tracking cookies, and JavaScript, giving people a clean way to read posts without an account or the app. After that crackdown, anyone hosting a Nitter instance had to connect it to a real X account, according to the project’s GitHub page; despite the restrictions, development picked back up and instances came back online.

This time, X is working to shut Nitter down through legal means. Nitter’s website says the Nitter.net project is offline while its creator, a developer who goes by the handle Zedeus, seeks legal advice; Zedeus told TechCrunch by email that other Nitter instances received similar letters. The site’s message reads in part: “Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.”

The letter from X, which TechCrunch has viewed, accuses Nitter of “unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data,” saying X has evidence Nitter scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules. Lawyers for X said the actions violate several state and federal laws, including the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act and the Lanham Act, and gave Nitter until 5 p.m. EST on August 25 to shut down.

X is hardly alone in policing alleged scrapers — Meta has taken numerous scrapers to court, and most large social networks now restrict third-party readers, pushing users to log in through the official app, where they can be tracked and shown personalized ads. It’s an unfortunate development for lurkers, since Nitter and its instances offered a way to keep up with certain people’s posts on X without an account; those readers will now either lose that access or, as X likely hopes, create an account and log in.

Why it matters

The legal escalation against Nitter fits a broader pattern of social platforms forcing users through their official, ad-supported, trackable apps rather than tolerating lightweight third-party readers — a shift that steadily narrows how people can access public social media content anonymously.