I'm not defending Twitter or their policy in any way (disclaimer: I left Twitter the moment Elmo took over. I despise his hypocrisy and his fascist ideas)
But this could be a "legitimate f-up". Normally, most of these unsafe-url protection and detection is automated in something with the scale of Twitter.
Just like URL-shorteners often are (were?) "seemingly randomly" banned, because a portion of the shared urls are pointing at malware/phishing/otherwise banned content, all urls from this shortener get banned. It may be that signal.me is simply picking up on amount of illegitimate links. Signal is clearly growing strong. Therefore signal.me links' are increasingly seen by Twitter. Most legitimate links, but the amount of illegitimate links will then also increase.
This would trigger an automated ban¹.
The real problem then is that even if it was deliberate (conspiracy theory: Mark messaged Elon: Pls help me curb the growth of the biggest competitor of Whatsapp?) twitter can easily hide behind "overzealous automation, sorry".
¹ Especially if this automation isn't maintained properly, finetuned and kept being tweaked by teams of experts - many of which left or were layd off after the aquisition of Twitter.
Signal.me links are just a way to easily send either a phone number or user name to someone else. No cryptographic identity. No protection of the phone number or user name. So to get around the ban a Signal user could simply send their phone number or user name over Twitter/X.
It seems that the encrypted username form does provide some identity protection in that it can be cancelled, but for as long as it is active it appears that someone can just ask the Signal server what the associated user name is.
The people involved probably should not be using Twitter/X for this sort of thing in the first place. Mastodon comes to mind as an alternative, but really, anything else.
Pretty sure it's because literally all the signal.me links are the same when you remove the part after the #.
When you perform an HTTP(S) request you never provide the part after the # in the request URL, it's only interpreted by the web browser itself. It's likely that their antispam thing does the same and ignores the hash altogether.
On a similar note: the Swedish armed forces just came out and recommended that people working for the military should use signal for their calls and messages for things that are not classified in any of the higher classifications.
I was curious because over here, the ownership of signal.me is pretty much obscured (behind Cloudflare and WHOIS privacy). Doing this for infrastructure domains is not a good idea because it encourages persistent overblocking because it makes manual review more difficult. At least there is official documentation mentioning signal.me: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320291-Fi...
(The page is in the Bing index, but it seems "signal.me" is treated as a stop word by the search engine.)
Shoshana Zuboff was so right it is scary. The name ('Surveillance Capitalism') put me on the wrong foot as I already knew about the surveillance part. But what I found most scary was the part where the tech companies turned from surveillance to influence. Once you have these billions of people using only your platform to view the world, it is trivial alter their view of the world. And thereby changing policital currents, policies, opinions.... anything.
It is like the Bible before Martin Luther translated it into German, and all christians just had to accept blindly that whatever the priests said was written in the bible actually was. Most humans now have so little input other than whatever priests they follow we might as well be back in the dark ages.
In my opinion, Elon Musk initially endorsed Signal because of its strong encryption, security, and commitment to privacy. Now, he's blocking it for those very same reasons—what a blatant double standard!
On a related note, one of the key advantages of the modern internet—and more specifically, social media—is that everything you say publicly is archived. This means that if you ever do a complete 180° on your claims or principles, it can easily come back to haunt you. So, it's always wise to be mindful of what you say and stay true to your values.
This may come as a shock to him: Free Speech means to allow people to say something that he disagree with. Something that may hurt his interests or even his ego. Free speech is not to allow people to say things he agree with or don't care about.
This is what happens when a society allows narcissists in positions of power. It's a disease and when they refuse to seek treatment, it should make them ineligible for any leadership position, in both the private and public sector.
Nobody (sane) would allow a psychotic individual to run for president or become a CEO. This is the same thing, except they are less of a danger to themselves and more to others.
And of course they're able to craft more convincing lies. Mr. Musk never cared about free speech, only about being worshipped and the best way to achieve that is to say what people want to hear.
Instagram blocked telegram 8 years ago and nobody complained, the ban in still in place as far i know; trying to block the competition is fairly common, unfortunately
Signal could start doing some posts praising Musk and promoting Tesla or whatever scam he’s pushing at the given moment, that would unblock them really fast.
Pre-Musk Twitter was indeed bad, a sign of it’s time and dying. Now it’s even worse and quite pathetic.
I think it is critical to not forget the context of russian aligned bots getting free reign on Twitter, they are not being blocked, and Musk is keeping close ties to Putin.
This comment section has turned into something of a circle, it's cool to be mad nd all, but there was a comment expressing doubt at the details, wonder about a reason other than those stated, and asking if anyone independently verified, as I clicked it the comment was flagged to oblivion. No opportunity to engage with that viewpoint.
Remember the Arab Spring and how Twitter was hailed as a tool for the masses to fight against their oppressors? And remember how Elon bought Twitter, loudly proclaiming he was doing so to defend free speech?
I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
If you just need to get all the emotions off your chest, feel free to continue, If you want to know what's actually getting blocked see the discussion here
At this point you're actively contributing to the death of free speech if you're still active on X in any way. There are no excuses to use it still if you have any sort of functional moral compass.
I think the only smaet business move for twitter right now is to ban all external links in posts, like Instagram and TikTok.
It was never much of a driver of traffic outside news and most news consumers that click have already left. And most news sources you'd want to click are behind paywalls The users that remain are more likely to watch Twitter videos and read those long-ass tweets, out of loyalty to Papa Elon.
The logical explanation to me is that most of the Signal contacts shared tend to be for drugs or CSAM trading, so they went for the nuclear approach to make moderation easier.
Can’t really tell what most of you are complaining about. You can say anything on X (short of doxing and inciting violence and things that are against the law), you can follow or block anyone on X.
If they ban Signal links, a competitor platform, that’s a shame, but whatever you say on Signal you can say on X instead.
Seems like some people think a “free speech platform” would be some sort of moderated debating space where opinions you dislike are silenced on your behalf and the downstream political ramifications are things that you personally enjoy, or else it’s not free speech but “fascism” (lol).
Somehow I don’t believe this, it is too much out of character, even if it fits so nicely with how we want to see Elon. Did anyone here actually confirm this? I never used Twitter nor X or id check myself.
X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
(disruptionist.com)787 points by confusing3478 17 February 2025 | 752 comments
Comments
But this could be a "legitimate f-up". Normally, most of these unsafe-url protection and detection is automated in something with the scale of Twitter.
Just like URL-shorteners often are (were?) "seemingly randomly" banned, because a portion of the shared urls are pointing at malware/phishing/otherwise banned content, all urls from this shortener get banned. It may be that signal.me is simply picking up on amount of illegitimate links. Signal is clearly growing strong. Therefore signal.me links' are increasingly seen by Twitter. Most legitimate links, but the amount of illegitimate links will then also increase.
This would trigger an automated ban¹.
The real problem then is that even if it was deliberate (conspiracy theory: Mark messaged Elon: Pls help me curb the growth of the biggest competitor of Whatsapp?) twitter can easily hide behind "overzealous automation, sorry".
¹ Especially if this automation isn't maintained properly, finetuned and kept being tweaked by teams of experts - many of which left or were layd off after the aquisition of Twitter.
* https://signal.miraheze.org/wiki/Signal.me_URLs
* https://signal.miraheze.org/wiki/Usernames#Username_links
Signal.me links are just a way to easily send either a phone number or user name to someone else. No cryptographic identity. No protection of the phone number or user name. So to get around the ban a Signal user could simply send their phone number or user name over Twitter/X.
It seems that the encrypted username form does provide some identity protection in that it can be cancelled, but for as long as it is active it appears that someone can just ask the Signal server what the associated user name is.
The people involved probably should not be using Twitter/X for this sort of thing in the first place. Mastodon comes to mind as an alternative, but really, anything else.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579873
When you perform an HTTP(S) request you never provide the part after the # in the request URL, it's only interpreted by the web browser itself. It's likely that their antispam thing does the same and ignores the hash altogether.
————
Example of link (blocked): https://signal.me/#eu/P01wpUmC4nT2BBTwMrPAw7Nxcp81055tKHGbYw...
Without the hash (blocked): https://signal.me/
There is no blocking if you add any letters in the path (e.g. “abc”): https://signal.me/abc#eu/P01wpUmC4nT2BBTwMrPAw7Nxcp81055tKHG...
https://link-in-a-box.vercel.app
If you think someone might benefit from it, please share. Also, spam if you have feedback!
https://cornucopia.se/2025/02/forsvarsmakten-infor-krav-pa-s... (Swedish)
(The page is in the Bing index, but it seems "signal.me" is treated as a stop word by the search engine.)
It is like the Bible before Martin Luther translated it into German, and all christians just had to accept blindly that whatever the priests said was written in the bible actually was. Most humans now have so little input other than whatever priests they follow we might as well be back in the dark ages.
Edit:
In my opinion, Elon Musk initially endorsed Signal because of its strong encryption, security, and commitment to privacy. Now, he's blocking it for those very same reasons—what a blatant double standard!
On a related note, one of the key advantages of the modern internet—and more specifically, social media—is that everything you say publicly is archived. This means that if you ever do a complete 180° on your claims or principles, it can easily come back to haunt you. So, it's always wise to be mindful of what you say and stay true to your values.
The stripped those promises from us, tried to flog memecoins to steal from us and now pushing AI garbage onto us.
This may come as a shock to him: Free Speech means to allow people to say something that he disagree with. Something that may hurt his interests or even his ego. Free speech is not to allow people to say things he agree with or don't care about.
Nobody (sane) would allow a psychotic individual to run for president or become a CEO. This is the same thing, except they are less of a danger to themselves and more to others.
And of course they're able to craft more convincing lies. Mr. Musk never cared about free speech, only about being worshipped and the best way to achieve that is to say what people want to hear.
Can this be titled clearly?
Trust in society is being eradicated and that's how authoritarian regimes win.
Great video to understand what's going on: https://youtu.be/nknYtlOvaQ0?si=1LP6QsbFgIvpfIay
It's sad
Pre-Musk Twitter was indeed bad, a sign of it’s time and dying. Now it’s even worse and quite pathetic.
I'm mildly curious to see how X tries to justify this, but I suspect they've reached the stage where they don't even need to pretend to pay lip service to their notional values.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43077124
It was never much of a driver of traffic outside news and most news consumers that click have already left. And most news sources you'd want to click are behind paywalls The users that remain are more likely to watch Twitter videos and read those long-ass tweets, out of loyalty to Papa Elon.
If they ban Signal links, a competitor platform, that’s a shame, but whatever you say on Signal you can say on X instead.
Seems like some people think a “free speech platform” would be some sort of moderated debating space where opinions you dislike are silenced on your behalf and the downstream political ramifications are things that you personally enjoy, or else it’s not free speech but “fascism” (lol).