Twitter login bypass

Starting from July 2023 Twitter no longer allows users to browse their service without logging in.

What’s going on

All urls redirect to the signup page. Elon says that this is:

“Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”.

It’s doubtful that he is so afraid of web scrapers, because you can easily circumvent this limitation.
How? By simply changing the “User-Agent” header of request to “Googlebot”. It can be done by modifying settings in most of the modern web browsers.

Give me a break

This is one of the easiest things you can do according to 101 scraping tricks. For sure 99% of the end-users won’t do that, so maybe this restriction is meant also for acquiring new verified customers he needs to create everything app (like Chinese WeChat, but for the rest of the World). To be fair, other platforms also try hard to convince you to create an account, making it inconvenient or even impossible for unregistered users to use the site (Meta, I’m talking about you).

Regardless of motivation, if you just want to simply view some tweets without the hassle of login, check out my simple app: Twitt-agra* (if you are curious about the origin of the name, check the description at the bottom).

Or maybe it’s a good reason to stop this addiction of checking what others have to say. I know that it’s easier said than done, because in this day and age this medium is regarded as a legitimate propaganda tube for many public figures/agencies/leaders. I personally don’t have this dilemma anymore, because they deleted my account (@pythonsway).

Don’t ask me how this happened

I was using Twitter alongside with the other platforms to post mentions of my new blog posts. It was fully automated, almost zero engagement from my side (I know I Could be better in that social game). But anyway, at a certain point I’ve started receiving some weird recommendations and notifications for this account, to discover later that my account was hacked most likely due to a data breach by Twitter (which was well reported, of course disregarded by them). At this point I wasn’t thinking it would become such a big deal, I simply started by changing my password and some media files like logo…, and then bam! I got this email:

Still I was seeing this as a standard security measure taken by professional company, but I was wrong, next ‘dialogue’ was like infinite loop:

So yes, from my standpoint it’s personal: let Twitter burn, ”light em up light em up…”.

*) Meet Twitt-agra

The name comes from a monologue in the 2010 movie Hot Tub Time Machine:

-What about Twitter? Whatever the fuck that is.
-Hey, we could combine Twitter with fucking Viagra.
-Twitt-agra.

…

Lou

---

Update August 2023: While I’ve been working hard to circumvent this login thing, I haven’t noticed that Twiiter (sorry, now you should call it X)  has recently quietly dropped this requirement. Some content is once again accessible to visitors who were not logged in to an account. But still you can’t see just any account, nor individual tweets without a direct deep link or a login.