So... Twitter... sorry, X.com the everything app, decided to prefetch every damn link that shows up in your feed.
"Prefetching for Performance” (Or So They Claim...)
On paper, that sounds good, smooth user experience, faster loads, happy users, blah blah. And for your own website/web app it is standard practice to prefetch internal links to improve the user experience.
Except... instead of caching the HTML, JS, and CSS like any half awake developer would, they just execute it all in the background for as long as the link is visible...
You scroll by a link, and congratulations... you've clicked it, the page loaded, the scripts all ran, the cookies are set, invisibly...
Congratulations, You Just Visited Every IP Grabber on the Planet
Yeah... Twitter just shipped a Zero-Click Remote Code Execution as a feature... Every shady "check your IP” link, every sketchy tracker, every malware infested URL... you've now "visited" them all. Without tapping a single thing. It's like having a toddler sitting on your phone, hammering every link on screen because "clicks are fun!" Only this toddler works for X.com and doesn't understand what a security is...
Why? Because Ads.
This isn't about user experience or engineering efficiency. No. This is about metrics, those shiny, inflated "engagement numbers” that X can sell to advertisers. Show ad → user scrolls past → app silently "clicks” → boom, click-through rate up! Congratulations, Elon's empire now looks like the most "engaging” social platform on Earth. Meanwhile, users are bleeding data, leaking IP info, getting tracking cookies set by every site they see ads from, and maybe handing off browser tokens to a random crypto-miner link. But hey, who cares, the graphs are up and to the right.
“Innovation,” They Call It
This isn't a bug, it's a philosophy: engagement first, sanity later. The same mindset that gave us autoplay videos, infinite scroll, and apps begging for notification access now thinks client-side malware simulation is good UX. If you're running the X.com app on mobile right now, congratulations... you're the unpaid QA tester in their latest “growth experiment”... Your bandwidth? Gone. Your privacy? Gone. Your security? Gone... We used to sandbox the web to protect users... Now protecting users is a secondary concern...