Elon Musk's X Sends Cease‑And‑Desist to Nitter Over Alleged Data Scraping

X (formerly Twitter) sent a legal takedown notice to the open‑source front‑end service Nitter and its related service XCancel, alleging illegal data scraping, API circumvention, and violations of several state and federal statutes.

The notice claims Nitter accessed X's information in breach of its rules, including account and session tokens, and mirrored site content without authorization.

XCancel.com is now offline; its homepage displayed only a brief statement that on August 24 at 8 p.m. EDT the company received a cease‑and‑desist letter from X Corp.

Nitter maintainer zedeus posted that nitter.net has been shut down, development paused, and that he is seeking legal advice. The project's GitHub repository remains archived and read‑only, with a README containing explanatory text.

Nitter offers users a way to read X posts without registration, using no JavaScript or ads, providing faster read‑only access while not allowing posting, a feature X has long considered a pain point because it lets anonymous users view content without logging in.

Historically, after Twitter removed the visitor‑account feature in January 2024, zedeus announced the project's termination; a year later a workaround revived the service, which angered Musk’s legal team and led to the current accusations.

This is not an isolated case: Meta sued Israeli crawler company Bright Data in 2023 over similar data‑scraping concerns.

While Musk publicly open‑sources many of his companies' technologies, he asserts that X’s data is a core asset that must not be illegally copied or scraped.