The IWF in the UK are still complete fucking morons I see…
On February 9, 2023 a UK non-profit (The Internet Watch Foundation / IWF) discovered some illegal content (CP to be exact) being hosted on Twitter (and viewable via our Nitter instance). (Note: It wasn’t “discovered” per se, it was reported to them by someone)
The UK non-profit AUTOMATICALLY contacted contacted our registry (PIR / .org), our registry then contacted our registrar.
The UK non-profit AUTOMATICALLY contacted the German Federal Criminal Police Office who then contacted our server provider (Netcup).
The discovery was made at 10:30, our server provider, Netcup, suspended the server at 14:30 (for obvious reason, they didn’t want the content to be viewable from one of their IP).
It seems like the non-profit AND the Police just passed the information to our providers and didn’t actually do any investigation themselves which mean that: AT NO POINT WAS A HUMAN INVESTIGATING THE REPORT and AT NO POINT DID ANYONE TRY TO CONTACT US BEFORE CONTACTING OUR PROVIDERS.
Our registrar, Gandi, hasn’t done anything, and after receiving our explanation seems to have understood the issue.
Our registry, PIR, gave us 96 days to “remove” the content.
The rare copyright takedown requests were a problem, but were easy to solve, but here it went too far.
It was supposed to be “fun”, to be a work of love, at no point was I making any money on this - the donations obviously help (massive thanks to the people who donate), but don’t even cover the server expenses.
The stress and effort spent on Nitter (a service I personally barely use) simply isn’t worth it, I’m not here to moderate the content Twitter isn’t moderating, especially not for free.
The Nitter instance has therefore been shutdown permanently.