X.com is one of our third-party sign-in partners. It's not required that you sign in or sign up through X.com or any third-party service to use Medium. However, linking your X.com account to your Medium account enables you to extend the functionality of what you publish on Medium to other social networks.
X.com offers 3 levels of access to user accounts:
- “read” (Read-only)
- “read-write” (Read & Write)
- “read-write-direct messages” (Read, Write, & Direct Message)
Our application, and most other X.com enabled applications, uses the middle level (Read & Write). This level of permission allows to us to enable following @Medium on X.com during the sign up flow, unless you opt-out of that option. We also use this permission to power a Medium-native X.com sharing function. We won’t ever change your profile, send X.com posts you didn't initiate, follow other accounts on X.com, or do anything else nefarious to your X.com account.
Unfortunately, we aren't able to request X.com permissions individually, it’s only by the levels established by X.com. For more details, see X.com's developer site.