Twitter’s removing “Twitter for X” labels? Here’s how it just made the platform worse.

Twitter for iPhone.

Sounds like a social status and a nightmare for Android phone companies when accidentally tweeting from their iPhones.

Well, that’s until Elon decided to remove it because he thought it was a waste of space and compute.

But we feel removing it just makes the platform worse, especially in terms of spam, automated engagement, and disinformation.

How can you tell real vs. automated posts on Twitter? How do you tell a cyborg (real × bot) account?

Real quick before the labels are deleted from our devices, I’d like to point out a recycled developer named Madza.

You’ll notice that his Tweets and Replies are full of recycled Twitter threads. Yeah, they’re recycled as you, as a software developer, might already know some of his “interesting facts” even years before his thread. And it’s definitely a red flag to see that he very rarely responds to thousands of incoming comments from people he “engaged” with, or should I say, just happen to be algorithmed by Twitter.

From that little, “space-wasting” piece of information, we can already see that he always uses a third-party engagement platform named FeedHive.

And of course, FeedHive denied our claims that people like him use FeedHive’s amazing, AI-powered tools for raising their number of likes, comments, retweets, and followers.

Hiding this info from the public just made the platform worse. Now we can’t tell which Tweets were made by, for example, a ChatGPT AI instead of real humans.

For security reasons…

These labels are also a good way of identifying things like misinformation and possible cyber attacks happening on third-party apps.

For example, a third-party app accidentally leaked their Twitter API keys, and all the users’ Twitter Authorization Session keys, which can be exploited to promote things, such as scams and malvertising.

Or in case you still don’t understand: let’s say that you’ve authorized a third-party app to Twitter, including posting on behalf of your account. These credentials are stored online and the app was suddenly hacked.

In this case, we could help investigate whether things like this could occur, by scanning Tweets for the same info used to mock Android companies for using iPhones.

Our plans.

Even if stubborn Elon would not listen to our advice, we will still support the inclusion of this tag on many federated social platforms. Mastodon is one of the early adopters for this, and we’ll proudly support the inclusion of the same feature in Misskey and Pleroma as well, for security purposes as well as promoting diversity and inclusion of Fediverse clients and apps.