Safety

A federal appeals court has thrown out journalist Alex Berenson's lawsuit over the permanent suspension of his Twitter account in 2021, ruling that the case he built around an alleged government and industry conspiracy does not hold up in law. The decision in Berenson v. Gottlieb, issued by the Second Circuit on October 20, 2026, affirms a district court ruling that had dismissed several defendants in 2025.

If you have connected a scheduling tool to X in the past few weeks, you have probably met the warning. The authorization screen tells you, in X's own words, that "This app is not affiliated with X and is requesting sensitive permissions," and it asks you to tick a box labeled "I trust this app" before you can continue. It looks like a security alert. According to reporting published on Friday by FutureTweets, it is not a glitch, and it is not going away.

A Dutch court has cleared the way for a collective damages case against X to be argued in full. On Thursday, October 22, the District Court of Amsterdam ruled that the proceedings brought by Stichting Onderzoek Marktinformatie, known as SOMI, may proceed, finding that the foundation meets all legal requirements to bring the action and appointing it the exclusive representative in the case. The case will now proceed on the merits.

X faced one of its sharpest warnings yet from a government on Thursday, October 22, when a South Korean lawmaker told a National Assembly audit hearing that drug sales and sex-trafficking posts remain searchable on the platform, and that if the situation is not improved by the end of this year, X should be designated a harmful site and its access blocked.

Polymarket's official presence on X has gone dark for users in India. On Thursday, October 22, users inside the country began sharing screenshots of X's standard account-withheld notice on the prediction market's profile, stating that the account has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand. Indian users can no longer view the profile or its posts, while outside India the account continues to function normally.

Nearly one in four accounts that follow or amplify the X account @Wallface show bot-like signals, according to a study published on October 21 by the Antisemitism Research Center, part of the Combat Antisemitism Movement. The finding is a reminder for everyday users that follower counts and repost totals on X do not always reflect real people paying attention.

Community Notes was built on a simple promise: instead of X deciding what counts as misinformation, its users would. A new preprint from a group of X engineers, analyzed this month by Indicator, shows how far that promise has drifted. The notes readers see most often are now written largely by X itself, through an open-source AI notewriter called the Community Writer, which the engineers describe as the program's largest AI API client.

X's new Terms of Service took effect on October 9, 2026, and the most telling change is a short sentence that is no longer there. The previous terms said, in the section that lets X revise the agreement, "The changes will not be retroactive." In the new version, that sentence is gone in both regional texts, according to a line-by-line comparison published by Venpo, which monitors vendor terms.

For years, people who wanted to read public posts on X without signing in had a quiet workaround. Nitter, an open-source project, fetched public posts and presented them in a clean, lightweight view, stripping out ads, tracking cookies and heavy scripts. Services such as XCancel were built on top of it, and many readers treated those pages as their front door to the platform.

Letting an AI agent spend your money is a very different kind of trust from asking it a question, and that difference was on full display on X on Thursday, October 15.