@triplenadir @Edo_Secco @Gunther

How do I take down the account containing my likeness and tweets, created from the BirdsiteLive bridge?

I did NOT consent to having my tweets and photo posted elsewhere, and wasn’t even aware, until getting questions from people about which one is my “real” mastodon.

This isn’t okay to do without consent, and it is not ethical at all, despite claiming to be.

@BirdsiteLIVE

Please see the above toot. This is not okay. I want this “copy” of me taken down.

@BirdsiteLIVE it is also probably resulting in people tagging that account instead of mine and wondering why I’m not seeing the toots.

This is so messed up for so many reasons and was clearly not thought out with creator consent in mind. Very odd to me that you went out of your way to label this “ethical” when it is not.

@justkelly_ok it's called an "ethical bridge" in opposition to how unethically people did create bridges and mirrored accounts before that. You can find more informations about the current state of the project here: https://write.as/nicolas-constant/closing-the-official-bsl-instance

And as stated in the post, I don't host any instance currently, if you want to contact another instance admin, please follow this procedure: https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/wiki/How-to-contact-Instance-Owner

Closing the official BSL instance

While it was always planed (and disclosed as such since the beginning) I decided to close the official instance of BirdsiteLIVE a bit ear...

Nicolas Constant - DevBlog
@BirdsiteLIVE Great so you’re just going to leave this tool out there knowing people don’t want it used to copy their likenesses and accounts, knowing that mods of other instances may not take it down, and may even abuse it? This is the account btw, it’s on your instance and still showing for some
@BirdsiteLIVE I’m not interested in the history of how stuff was done before. “Slightly more ethical” != ethical.
This is really not okay. I have a stalker! Did you even consider risks to marginalized or targeted people?
@BirdsiteLIVE at the very least, if you want it to be ethical, people should be able to opt out of their accounts being copied like this. Even bots like thread unrollers on twitter allow people to opt out.
@BirdsiteLIVE actually, other similar tools are MORE ethical because they require the owner of the account to set up the mirror themselves and oauth to both.
@justkelly_ok that's not the tools I'm referring to: people created public accounts mirroring other accounts, posting in public mode feeding on Nitter RSS feeds.
That's the issue BSL addressed and helped to reduce, and stopped in some cases.
@BirdsiteLIVE and I’m supposed to care because why? This is still very harmful and I just found out there are even more clones of my account that appear to others but don’t come up in search from this instance

@BirdsiteLIVE So it’s not really feasible for people to monitor every instance where this might happen and contact the instance creator to get it taken down. I’ve had to rely on other people sending me screenshots of my “clones” that come up in search for them but not me.

Again: I have a stalker, and this is a really serious safety issue for me and others.

You don’t owe me anything and don’t have to care what I think but you can be considerate of people’s safety ffs.

@justkelly_ok look, I'm sorry you have a stalker (seriously), but in this case you need to switch your twitter account on protected mode.

If you're publishing publicly, everyone can access your data via a browser, any nitter instance, and any 3rd party twitter client app using the API like BSL. And any of your data can also be archived using web.archive.org. This isn't really a BSL related issue.

Also, if your account switch on protected mode, mirrors on every instances will remove all (...)

@BirdsiteLIVE @justkelly_ok opt out is *so* fundamental - what’s happening here is like a crawler to ignoring robots.txt and responding to folks saying “you’re being an asshole” by saying “oh wow you really need to password protect your web pages, anyone can scrape them”
@simrob @BirdsiteLIVE Perfect analogy, thank you.

@justkelly_ok @simrob I don't agree with your analogy: Twitter EULA state your data will be available through Twitter API. And that's what BSL is using.

But I DO agree the search leakage is an issue (as I state in the blog post you didn't read), that's in fact the reason I shut down the instance I had control on, and encouraged other admin to limit the reach of their instances. Since the service didn't operate the way I really wanted it to do.

@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob if you’re encouraging all that and recognize the potential problems, I think you could at least make them much clearer and more prevalent on the GitHub page. But I still wonder why you won’t even consider removing it, even knowing it likely breaks privacy laws.

Yes tweets are accessible through the public API. That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to use them however you want. I own the content I create. I could do a DMCA take down of all these instances.

@justkelly_ok @simrob

Consider removing what? The code? Most BSL instance run on a fork of my code, I don't have control over it. And if I remove it, I can't add the missing functionalities you're already asking for and that was already planned (and I'm convinced that the forks will happily retrieve them).

Lets say I listen to you and remove it: forks will prevail as is, and flaws will remain. Might not be the best move, isn't it?

@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob actually it is. And as I’ve already pointed out: it violates the API TOS.

@justkelly_ok @simrob

The code doesn't violate the TOS, since... it's code, not a hosted service.

About the service itself, that's one of the many reasons I recommend using the code on a personal scale, to fit the personal use case. Ideally only available on a 1 person instance.

That's also why in my blog post (yes, again) I link to those TOS and ask instance owners to check for themselves.

@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob In your blog post, which most people will never see. And on the project page there are quite recent posts where you’re encouraging people to incorporate it into their instances.

Clearly people aren’t reading your warning or aren’t heeding it, because they are all - seemingly unknowingly - violating the TOS.

@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob it’s interesting how you used “you agreed to twitter’s TOS when you use the service” as one of your main points, and when I pointed out this violates the TOS - and therefore breaks user expectation and consent - you move the goalposts to “I just wrote the code, not my fault if people deploy it”
@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob why make all those posts about “it uses the twitter API and you agreed to its terms” to justify this? It implies you agree that building something that knowingly violates those terms would be an issue
@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob does Paul know and fully understand that he’s violating the twitter TOS? I would bet that he does not. Are you going to inform him? I’m betting you will not.
@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob also a simple way to make centralized opt out would be: create a twitter account representing the bot. Let users know they can prevent scraping their content if they block that account. Check for that block before scraping it.

@justkelly_ok @simrob

Interesting idea but not technically feasible: you can't share access of the bot to other instance owner.

@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob I’m not sure what you mean. I have not used the twitter API in a long time and a lot has changed, but can you not check “does x user block y account” where you have an API key for y?
@justkelly_ok @simrob I can check again but my guess is this is a per account setting, using a personal token representing the account.
@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob btw here’s a link to the terms where I got one of the screenshots. There are multiple sets of terms spread across different pages. But this one seems to outline some things that would clearly forbid taking tweet content out of twitter context and putting it elsewhere without supporting all of the things that you can do on an embedded tweet. https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/display-requirements
Display requirements – Twitter Developers

Tweets are one of our most visible brand elements, so it’s important that they are presented correctly. You should comply with the display requirements below when you display Tweets, timelines, and other Twitter content.

@justkelly_ok @simrob

I don't personally think BSL violate Twitter TOS. I've read it a lot of time, and that's not my understanding.

BUT since some people understand those TOS differently, I recommend instance admin to check it for themselves and to not rely on my own understanding of it. And I made this very clear in my blog post.

@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob if it takes tweet content and puts it on a site surrounded by actions where people can: like, comment, or follow but it isn’t a twitter like/comment/follow - a mastodon one, for example - that’s a pretty explicit violation of the fourth screenshot
@BirdsiteLIVE @simrob there are also no tweet action icons that translate to twitter likes/follows/replies as required by the first bullet. No replies are shown as required by the last bullet.
Basically taking the contents of a tweet and turning it into a post on another social media site with its own system of likes, comments, follows etc that isn’t twitter, isn’t allowed.