Yeah, plus payment info is also pretty significant in terms of identifying information, unless they were willing to provide gift cards in physical stores or something. There would need to be a huge legislative push to get them to give up data collection at the same time for any net benefit.

What scares me more than Twitter pulling these stunts is YouTube. Like, Twitter going down would hurt a lot of artists and creatives and break apart a lot of connections, and it’d be pretty harsh on a lot of people. YouTube going down would be a calamity across government, education, technology, entertainment, and more as billions of tutorials, educational clips, public announcements, etc are wiped off the face of the planet. And the fact that it needs ads and data harvesting to continue existing has possibly been one of the biggest drivers for Google to continue pushing features that lock down the web browser. There is nothing that can stop it except some massive government mobilization (which we can’t exactly trust the US government to do alone).