9 ms·
Twitter is using its embedded JavaScript to hide tweets that have been deleted
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Cgwftsn 4y ago٥اتعتاقر٧و
- ec109685 4y agoThis is so stupid on twitter's part. It's obviously easy for publishers to work around by including both the blockquote of the tweet (unadorned), plus the version w/ the twitter embed class. End result will be much uglier pages.
- WatchDog 4y agoFunctionality aside embedding random scripts from twitter seems like a big risk for security and privacy. At a minimum, it should probably be embedded in a sandboxed iframe. Just taking a screenshot, and linking to the tweet, seems like a more robust solution, that won't randomly stop working, and doesn't have the same privacy issues.
- Closi 4y agoTotally agree. I wonder if this is by-design. Lots of companies would love to have control of a javascript snippet operating on the worlds biggest websites.
- cerved 4y agoThis practice can hardly come as news. They all do this with their social buttons and have been for almost 20 years
- jdrc 4y agoThere should be an HTML <remote> tag or something that downloads and embeds HTML from a remote site without scripting
- moonchild 4y agoDon't [i]frames solve this problem? They can use scripts, sure, but those scripts are contained and cannot reach outside their box.
- robin_reala 4y agoA quick sandbox attribute and the scripts will be disabled: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/iframe#attr-sandbox https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/if...
- saagarjha 4y agoOk, but then Twitter is just going to make that return a 404. How does this solve the problem?
- victorstanciu 4y ago"Functionality aside embedding random scripts from twitter seems like a big risk for security and privacy." When I started blogging again, I wanted to render my Twitter feed on the homepage, as a sort of bitesize alternative to the regular content, but I too have a deep aversion to allowing external scripts on my websites. So I added some code to my Hugo theme that pulls the tweets from my profile via the Twitter API and renders them statically.
- gigaflop 4y agoBack when I was applying for my first career position, one of the companies asked for a demo project, with one of the options being something that could poke at the Twitter API. It was pretty darn simple to get the text of a tweet, and just apply some styles to it. If one was motivated, making something to replace Twitter's version of embedding would not be very difficult.
- ivanche 4y agoHey Victor, would you mind sharing that piece of code?
- victorstanciu 4y agoHey, sure, I set up a repo just now. Lemme know if it works for you or not: https://github.com/victorstanciu/hugo-tweets https://github.com/victorstanciu/hugo-tweets
- cxr 4y agoThis is still "vulnerable", in a way (though not the same kind of vulnerability as embedding third-party scripts): if Twitter disappears—or just stops returning your tweets for some other reason (e.g. they shut down their API or your account)—then you lose access to your content. It can be mitigated by making sure your SSG output is also in version control—not just the input. (While you're at it, it's a good idea to make sure your SSG is version controlled, too. That doesn't have to be a whole copy of the SSG source and/or binary in your repo; it can be e.g. its version string.) That of course still leaves open the matter of whether/how you're making sure to trigger a new build for every new tweet.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agoalso this is why you use those sha integrity hashes.. so other sites dont randomly update their script to do evil things
- PinguTS 4y agoThat said, screenshots of such things bear their own problems in terms of accessibility for screen readers and other supportive devices.
- bartread 4y ago> bear their own problems Sure, but these problems were anticipated in the design of, certainly later, HTML specs. One example: the ALT text tag for images, which has been part of the spec since at least HTML4, originally published as a recommendation in 1997. Every image on your website(s) should have ALT text to be screenreader friendly and, if it doesn't, that's on you: it doesn't make using images an inherently bad or accessibility-unfriendly idea.
- ljm 4y agoThe unstyled blockquote is probably enough, without pulling down the JS to embed twitter's marketing, tracking, and whatever else they might be observing. Is it necessary for a quoted tweet to look exactly like it came from Twitter when the text and a link serves an identical purpose? That said, if someone wants to delete a tweet or otherwise correct the record, are you prepared to issue a correction of your own when quoting a tweet? The internet is particularly unforgiving when it comes to this.
- scim-knox-twox 4y ago> Just taking a screenshot, and linking to the tweet, seems like a more robust solution, that won't randomly stop working, and doesn't have the same privacy issues. And have none accessibility.
- saagarjha 4y agoYou can include a copy of the text along with a screenshot, or put it in alt text…
- scim-knox-twox 4y agoNo, it is not for that.
- raverbashing 4y ago* its embedded javascript (it is correct on the site itself) > That widgets.js script looks for blockquotes with the class="twitter-tweet" on, and replaces them with a Twitter branded iframe to confirm that it is a real tweet And that's how most libraries work? I don't see an issue. Yes, if you delete the tweet it seems they changed the behaviour (and that might be an actual bug) but still...
- thunderbong 4y agoIsn't this the way the internet is supposed to work? If I link to a page and the page is removed, it'll not show, right? Same thing if I were to add that page as an iframe on my site. So, IMHO, the title and the post doesn't make any sense. Twitter isn't editing anyone's site. You have chosen to embed some content of Twitter on yours and it is perfectly fine if they chose to remove it.
- scim-knox-twox 4y ago> Isn't this the way the internet is supposed to work? If I link to a page and the page is removed, it'll not show, right? Same thing if I were to add that page as an iframe on my site. But the link still will be on your site.
- mpettitt 4y agoIf you link to a page, whatever text you put in as the body of the link will remain. The link itself won't go anywhere, but the content you have added to it will remain. In this case, it's as if the link text also vanished when the target page vanishes. That would be an interesting solution to link rot, admittedly - lots of older pages which are just empty lists formerly containing links to now defunct websites!
- saagarjha 4y agoRight, but it was not added as an iframe, it was added with the actual content along with the script. So it's kind of like the iframe reaching out and deleting the surrounding conversation about that link once the page goes offline, if iframes could do such a thing.
- throwuxiytayq 4y agoWhy do you people even use Twitter? It's one giant pile of crappy content and dark ux patterns. What did you expect? That they'd play nice forever? Are you really new to this? Did your preschool not have a sandbox?
- taspeotis 4y agoI am not particularly upset by this. You choose to embed JavaScript that interoperates with your website to make tweets look like Twitter … Twitter has decided that deleted tweets look like nothing now … that’s what you wanted. Apparently the “contract” that Twitter would preserve the text of a deleted tweet was a tweet from some random employee.
- peanut_worm 4y agowhy dont you just remove the javascript so they appear as blockquotes? seems a bit dramatic. dont think i would expect twitter to show deleted tweets in the first place, id probably just use a screenshot if its something that i think might be removed.
- ChrisArchitect 4y agoDon't like the "Twitter Edits You" title of the article. Sensationalist/misleading. Tweet embeds are a live link to the Twitter system to show a tweet. To show the actual tweet from the Twitter platform. If the tweet doesn't exist, there's nothing to show. No one said it should maintain some kind of 'copy' of old data on your site.
- epeus 4y agoYou're wrong. The tweet embeds decorate a blockquote of the tweet - read the article. The now code removes that blockquote from the DOM.
- ChrisArchitect 4y agoApologies I understand more clearly that it is rewriting/overwriting the blockquote now. But that is the javascript hiding the blockquote, it's not "gone". It's still in the html, still visible to scanners and bots (and those with no javascript and perhaps also screenreaders for the a11y folks). Javascript/CSS hides alllll kinds of stuff on the web alllll the time to make pages look/format a certain way. They're not entirely right, but they're not wrong either. You're running their javascript to power the embed, and so they gave the response "respecting user's deletion".
- tester89 4y agoSomeone should probably just come third-party CSS/JS to emulate the tweet look that twitter had without importing twitter's JS.
- riffic 4y agofix the title please An apostrophe as a possessive marker in its is nonstandard: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/it%27s#Etymology_2 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/it%27s#Etymology_2
- ghayes 4y agoCurious if there’s any reason this is of particular importance. E.g. is it bad for screen readers?
- brobinson 4y agohis, hers, theirs, ours, yours,... it's? It is just egregiously wrong.
- xtian 4y agoIt's bad for English readers
- retSava 4y agoWe as human beings should always strive for the better, to improve, to do the best we can within reasonable bounds. It's imo not about pettiness, finding errors of others to shame them, or holding others to a bar set too high, but rather, if we don't, we start tumbling towards lesser good things as a society and community and humans. Not to say that it's not ok do make errors (it is, and it's human), but if we spot one and can easily correct it, we should.
- iepathos 4y agoThe real problem imo is twitter allowing people to delete their tweets at all. They need a no takesy backsies policy.
- joelhaasnoot 4y agoIf only they had an edit button...
- stingraycharles 4y agoThat would cause problems with regulations in the EU, as there is a “right to be forgotten”.
- tofuahdude 4y agoYou don't need to use Twitter's JS to show Tweets. If you choose to use their system, you're subject to their rules. If you don't like their rules, don't use their stuff. Calling it "altering the public record" is a little hyperbolic imo. If you want to act as a repository for the public record, you better use your own system. Twitter is under no obligation to retain this kind of stuff on your behalf. I'm not trying to say that this is right or wrong, just that these are the facts of the matter when you engage with a company's code and terms of service.
- gentleman11 4y agoI agreed with this several years ago, but I’m not sure any more. Software networks are very different than other things humans have had in the past. They are inherently winner take all and give the owner/creator unprecedented power over users that creators in past generations could only have dreamed of. I wonder if software companies should have some restrictions to make up for this
- macspoofing 4y agoThere's always a few that posts like this. Yes Twitter has a legal right to do stuff like this but can YOU separate what Twitter is legally allowed to do from what is the right thing to do? What's wrong with criticizing a particular policy from a corporate behemoth?
- tofuahdude 4y agoThe real issue is expecting that a for-profit company does "the right thing" according to some random moral compass.
- theelous3 4y ago> Twitter is under no obligation to retain this kind of stuff on your behalf. You have badly missed the most crucial message of the post. When you copy the embed link, you are copying the string literal of the tweet too. You put this text on your site. You are the one retaining it. The twitter module is hiding the text from the rendered page, rather than loading the local copy.
- Zardoz84 4y agoOmg... the thing about cited deleted tweets becomin a white glob, gives me some vibes of 1984's "rewriting history".
- jazzyjackson 4y agoTwitter is already a bone fide Memory Hole. When an account is banned, there is no proof that any of it ever happened.
- jdrc 4y agoOh boy wait until you see what adsense does
- maxloh 4y agoWhat do they do?
- jdrc 4y agohttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/55695667/adsense-injecting-style-tag-into-my-page-in-chrome https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55695667/adsense-injecti... https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/20491540/auto-ads-breaking-desktop-page-layout?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/20491540/auto-ads-...
- dheera 4y agoJust screenshot them instead of embedding them. If you cared about JS injection why would you embed anything?!
- jazzyjackson 4y agoHow are you supposed to prove the tweet actually happened if you just post a screenshot? It's trivial to forge a screenshot of a tweet to say whatever you want.
- dheera 4y agoYou search it. If it is deleted, you move on with your life and stop worrying about the past.
- rini17 4y agoYou can't prove it happened after twitter deleted it, either.
- Liquid_Fire 4y agoIt's presumably trivial to forge Twitter's "verified" embedding as well, so that doesn't prove anything. (Just have it link to a deleted tweet - plausible deniability!) If it still exists, just add a link to it underneath the screenshot. If it was deleted, then there's not much you can do, but that's no different than if you had embedded it.
- paxys 4y agoWhy not just copy paste or screenshot the Tweet? It's bizarre to reference a script from twitter.com directly in your site's source code and then complain that the script is doing exactly what it is supposed to.
- lapser 4y agoAesthetics and familiarity? It's a lot nicer to link the user's name directly to their profile, and the date directly to their tweet on Twitter as opposed to having a separately link or whatnot. For many, especially your average Joe/Jane, will expect the aforementioned behaviour.
- paxys 4y agoWell if you want Twitter's aesthetics then you have to import their CSS/JS and let them "edit your site". Or recreate all of it yourself. What solution are people looking for exactly?
- numeri 4y agoThe previously existing solution?
- smcl 4y agoPosting the screenshot of the tweet as a link to the tweet doesn't seem like an awful solution to me. Additionally if the tweet gets deleted or the user gets banned there is still some record of it and the page doesn't have a weird gap where a tweet should be.
- polydevil 4y ago- copy paste the content of the tweet - meta data is lost (date and time, author, obv it is possible to copy paste the text and add links to original tweet and link to an author; - screenshot - now you dont have to add custom styles, meta data exists, but it is not usable - you can make is to click on tweet will open a tweet, but click on tweet author will open authors profile. Also screenreaders and bots - they dont parse text from images and it is harder to make images work on smaller screens. The solution is not as simple as - ctrl+c ctrl+v text or screenshot and call it a day. You need to consider that content will be interactive (all links should work) and accessible (for screenreaders and mobile). ___ So it is understandable why low effort approach with embedded scripts, but less secure is more popular than high effort most likely not completely working, but more secure approach. The better way would be to use twitter api and render tweets with your own styles. Safe, accessible, interactive.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- iforgotpassword 4y agoI've never understood why people even wanted to use this. For the styling? So you can just copy some random stuff from Twitter and it looks like Twitter but is also interactive? Just with the Facebook like-Button, you're exposing your visitors to the tracking of Twitter. For what? Just so you can quickly copy one snippet and be done with it, instead of manually copying author name, content and link and spending 10 seconds to format this yourself. I wish I had something constructive to say, but this always seemed like a totally unnecessary "feature" with a lot of downsides. Instead of embedding 280 characters in your website you make it download an order of magnitude more from somewhere else and then execute code to display those characters in a way someone else deems appropriate.
- hackernewds 4y agoIt is for a good reason. The original content of the tweet is preserved and not editorialized. Also Twitter has explicit rules around the display of tweets
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y agoWorse, it seems like most of the time you'd want a screenshot to preserve the original text. Which takes less styling to look right.
- schlipity 4y agoOne small note about using a screenshot versus actual text is that a screenshot does not scale with resolution. I think a lightly styled html box with the tweet as text would be the best of both worlds.
- andrewxdiamond 4y agoFor Twitter specifically, a link to the tweet is much more genuine than a screenshot, as screenshots can be faked, where tweets cannot be edited
- saagarjha 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ThePhysicist 4y agoWell, any third-party script that you embed on your website can edit your site and do many other nefarious things (key logging, credential stealing, ...). I never got how people can just copy/paste some random JS into their own websites (often without even using integrity tags). Social embeds in particular have turned the web into a surveillance machine for large corporations, as every FB/Twitter/Instagram/... embed tracks users across every web property that has such an embed, and until very recently almost every major website had such embeds. Luckily GDPR seems to have a chilling effect on recklessly embedding such stuff without thinking about privacy or security implications. Personally I hope that in a few years third-party embeds will mostly be a thing of the past.
- TomGullen 4y agoYou have to have some level of trust - our ASP.net website loads quite a few Nuget packages we regularly keep up to date. Theoretically any of them say Stripe or Paypal could add nefarious code into our site to steal a bunch of stuff - there's no practical way for us to review the source code before updating. For Javascript if you're paranoid you can add the `integrity` attribute, and most of the time you can self host the JS although all of these come with maintenance commitments. I think it's reasonable if you trust the source (Twitter for example) to embed their third party code.
- ThePhysicist 4y agoThe difference is that you have a contractual relationship with Stripe or Paypal when you use their services. When you embed FB/Twitter/... content there's no such relationship, that's the issue.
- TomGullen 4y agoOK bad examples, but any open source project you use via a package manager in your projects you have to trust and there's no contract or relationship there.
- 4y ago
- TomGullen 4y agoBBC website frequently embeds Tweets, wonder how long until we start seeing edits on them to promote websites or something.
- grey_earthling 4y agoAn embedded Tweet always promotes a website — twitter.com.
- mlatu 4y agoi'd just boycott using widgets.js maybe there should be an open and distributed ACTUAL public record? have we finally found an actual usecase for blockchains?
- dustinmoris 4y agoThis is why I never use these iframe widgets. They are not only useless and untrustworthy, they are also damn slow. I take a screenshot of the tweet I want to reference, put it into a bucket behind a CDN and then embed an <img> of the tweet inside an <a> which links back to the tweet. If the tweet gets deleted then the link will break and users will see that the tweet was deleted, but my screenshot stored on my own servers will remain forever and my website will continue to make sense. Own your data, own your blogs, own your words, own what you create/write/do on the web. Don't rely on third party services uphold a common sense contract or what most people would expect is the ethical/correct/good thing to do.
- fay59 4y agoIt kinda sucks, but “tampering with the public record”? Is Twitter liable for holding the public record now?
- smokey_circles 4y ago> Tampering with the public record Oh come off it already. What a remarkably brain dead opinion. Twitter _is not a public utility_. It owes you _nothing_. Their property, their decision. That simple. I do have an issue with the idea of their JS manipulating your own website but fuck off with this "Twitter is a public service" argument. - They don't have to give you an account - You are not entitled to make demands of them - You can always use another service Goddamned children. Enough already.
- xigoi 4y agoIf Twitter is not a public service, it shouldn't be used for official communication by government representatives.
- OldTimeCoffee 4y agoPublic service means government run. A newspaper isn't a public service (in the US), but official notices can and do appear there. Even if no one reads the newspaper anymore. Same thing with private broadcasters like CNN, Fox News, etc. Public service has a specific definition.
- jazzyjackson 4y agoIt's a shame there's no better way to preserve a tweet than taking a screenshot -- there's no way to prove that an individual said something, save for perhaps trusting the record on archive.org It doesn't have to be this way. Either the individual or the platform could cryptographically sign content to prove that it really happened. I guess Twitter would prefer a plausible deniability. If anyone screenshots you saying something you regret, you can just say it was forged.
- maccard 4y agoI've never had my name dragged through the mud on twitter or anything but I'm super glad knowing that if I do make a mistake I can delete it rather than having it immortalised on the internet to be used as a weapon against me forever.
- Sayrus 4y agoThe blockquote is still inside the page and indexed by search engines. While many will get a blank preview, it is still immortalized on the internet and visible if you block Social Tracking / Twitter's widget.js.
- vntok 4y agoFor the vast vast majority of people (or as we call them in cases of cyber-harassment, "the mob"), it will be gone from the Internet.
- true_repairman 4y agoWhat a shame that Jack left. We could live in a utopia where every tweet is an NFT in the Twitter Blockchain...
- Santosh83 4y agoTwitter itself can always prove an individual user said something. I assume they never actually delete any tweet from their system, so a proper law enforcement request can require them to verify that a particular tweet actually did originate from a handle at such and such a time & IP.
- vixen99 4y agoShould read < its embedded Javascript >
- bussetta 4y agoWould it have been better if Twitter had announced this change and made the change only for the new tweets and left the existing ones as is?
- ethanwillis 4y agoIn my opinion, yes. I think that would be much better and more responsible. Are they a business or a political entity? Businesses need to be reliable
- rini17 4y agoLooks we need something server-side to fetch content from twitter/etc. once when article is published and then serve that copy. I can see the publishers unhappy and actively obstructing such a solution though.
- ki_ 4y agohmm. Personally i think when u delete a tweet, you should not be able to embed it. If you changed your mind about a tweet, you should be able to decouple it from your account. If people want to refer to tweets, how about a screenshot? It's safer, faster and cant 404 when twitter is down. And i think the whole "they edited my page" statement is ridiculous. You EMBED a part of twitter into your page. You know it can change. If you embed a youtube video, and the owner deletes it, it wont play anymore. obviously.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 6510 4y agoTrue of course, you pretty much hand them the key to your house to do as they please. I remember defunct banner ad services redirecting all pages with banners on them. The problem is real tho. You casually publish 1-3 things per day. After 20 years you have many thousands of pages that slowly rot away. You could monitor them and delete the articles but that doesn't always work. A tweet and a 5 second video in the middle of a lengthy article don't render the article useless. It becomes something like old paper publications citing lists of unobtainable things.
- epeus 4y agoRead the post - previously deleted tweets showed the blockquote fallback. Now they get a useless injected blank iframe, removing the blockquote from the dom.
- parksy 4y agoIf permanency is a priority then letting external scripts be responsible for presenting content is not a good idea, especially if the agreement doesn't make any promises about whether content will be permanent, and doubly so if the agreement / terms of service explicitly say they can change the behaviour of their services at any time. What this probably calls for and maybe something is out there is some service that can embed, archive, and track changes to a tweet or social media post. You'd embed the same way, but the archive will fetch and cache the content. It could then serve up the original version, as well as a timeline of changes. The right to be forgotten has merit though, and I can see twitter's logic there and probably they're under pressure via GDPR or something. So any archival or cache service would need to take that into account. Various countries and districts have varying laws on what is and isn't official public record too, so it seems like managing that could be the function of a dedicated archival service.
- demarq 4y ago> However, Twitter has broken this API contract. What contract?
- renewiltord 4y agoThe API contract laid out in their documentation. There’s a screenshot in the post right around there. The API contract is: > What happens when an author deletes their Tweet? The Twitter widgets JavaScript will not display a fully-rendered Tweet if the Tweet no longer exists on Twitter. The fallback <blockquote> containing Tweet information will be visible on the page.
- jdrc 4y agoAre we going to have a lot of similar posts? This sounds like expected bevahiour if you're inserting someone's JavaScript in your page
- account-5 4y agoDisclaimer: I'm not a web developer nor a journalist/blogger, whatever. My non-expert, likely useless, take on this: Don't use Twitter's technology. If you're interested in quoting a tweet to create a public take a screenshot, copy of the text, quote it and provide a link. Simple. If part of your post links, or portals, to another site you don't control it's not part of your blog/post/site. Complaining when remote content changes is pointless. You're not capturing what was when you link to remote content managed by someone else you're capturing something live, it's not a public record. It isn't quoting anything.
- numeri 4y agoThe key is that they're not linking remote content – they copied the content of the tweets into their websites' code, and then used Twitter's JS to render it. I.e., it used to be a purely stylistic change. All of a sudden, this very inert code has changed, without warning, to actually edit any websites using it to delete the text that they put there. I think many would consider this malware-adjacent, if it wasn't from such a large company.
- oauea 4y agoSo twitter is distributing malware now? Malware is defined by Wikipedia as: > Malware (a portmanteau for malicious software) is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, deprive users access to information or which unknowingly interferes with the user's computer security and privacy. This script distributed by twitter is software intentionally designed to cause a disruption to a server and to deprive users access to information.
- blendergeek 4y agoI see so many people here arguing that by embedding javascript directly from Twitter, you are accepting whatever they choose to make that javascript do. While that is true to an extent, Twitter has provided documentation for this javascript that says that if the Tweet gets deleted, the javascript will simply stop styling your quote of the tweet that you have on your website. By changing the behavior of the javascript, without even updating the documentation, Twitter has broken every rule of being a good distributor of third-party code. In a similar vein, any third party code could at any time do any number of malicious things. Just because I didn't pay Twitter for the privilege of running their code and just because I embedded their code in my website does not make it okay for them to start distributing malware to modify my website to their liking. There are lots of other malicious things Twitter could have the javascript do. Twitter could start showing ads before and after all quoted tweets. This would also conflict with the documentation and would be malicious.
- mgamache 4y ago"Twitter has broken every rule of being a good distributor of third-party code." Yes, and you've broken every rule of common sense by thinking that their goals are your goals and they have any interest in being a 'good' anything besides profitable. You are embedding code from a a money making bot. To expect them to host deleted tweets forever as some public record is absurd.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoOkay, but they’re not “hosting” anything (other than the script). They could take down the server with that script on it and the markup would show up fine. If Twitter went out of business tomorrow, all these tweets would magically show up again. But no, they’re going out of their way to break your webpage. That is absurd.
- mgamache 4y agoYou are using content from twitter on your page and then using a script from twitter to format the content, right? You've seeded control on how it's displayed. They changed their mind on how to format the content. You are responsible for your page no one else.
- meatsauce 4y agoUnless you commit and are convicted of an actual crime with your tweet, nothing - absolutely nothing - should result in a blanket ban or deletion of your post. And no, insulting the embedded bloodsuckers that hold congress (and our lives) in an iron grip is not a crime. We need to go back to the days when sticks and stones broke bones; when words were correctly not "violence" and that your right to not be insulted existed solely in that self-important (but empty) cavern between your ears.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gumby 4y agoImplicitly, when you quote a tweet you are agreeing to a contract of adhesion (basically a shrink wrap license or "by using this site you agree to our terms"). Twitter even told people that the quoted text would remain. Now site ToS usually say that they can change the terms whenever they want. But that's going forward: something you wrote in the past should be under the contemporaneous terms. So I wonder if someone could successfully sue under California law. If successful, it would be a great improvement to consumer rights.
- WorldMaker 4y agoThis seems to me like an improvement for systems that don't have blockquotes in their embedding source (previously the behavior was that if there was no HTML inside the embedding element there was no fallback at all and it was just an empty element) that was an accidental regression. I hope they add a simple check if the element has children or not to fix the regression, but I work on an app where some sort of fallback UI for deleted Tweets is a welcome change, even if "blank Tweet card" isn't a huge improvement, it's still a small win to get some hard-to-fix-on-our-side UI complaints off the backlog.
- car_analogy 4y agoHow long until people realize sites like Twitter are actively hostile, and embedding their scripts is equivalent to letting the Trojan horse through your gates?
- im3w1l 4y ago
- pwdisswordfish9 4y agoAren't they? Of course they are doing it for their own sneaky benefit, if only in terms of PR.
- simonjgreen 4y agoHN 2023 article: "Companies optimising for profit through good PR considered hostile"
- thirdvect0r 4y agoCorrect
- TobyTheDog123 4y agoTwitter is making a privacy tradeoff by removing content from my website in the case where it doesn’t have anything to enhance the content with? That sure seems hostile.
- btown 4y agoConsider it from the context of a "right to be forgotten" though. Setting aside whether that should be a legal right, there's certainly some kind of argument that if the right-to-be-forgotten is at some level a moral good, then technologies that assist in enforcing that right have at least some level of moral justification in doing so. Does that override the rights of a website operator to expect that their tools will not erase their content? Perhaps, perhaps not - but it is indeed a tradeoff.
- slater 4y agoFYI if you block their JS on third-party sites, it works fine: https://i.imgur.com/cb5Lyd5.png https://i.imgur.com/cb5Lyd5.png
- Hamcha 4y agoI was so confused when the article said "See? If I embed this tweet, you can't see it" but it was there to me (since Twitter JS is blocked by at least two extensions in my browser). Thank you for pointing that out!
- lapser 4y agoOh, this is the missing piece! It seems I'm blocking Twitter's JS if it's not on their site. I didn't even realise and I was confused about what the author meant as I could clearly see the tweet on their site.
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y agoWonder if you can just strip out the JS portion from their code.
- db48x 4y agoIt’s not even that twitter is hostile; allowing any third–party javascript onto your website is a mistake.
- nickmyersdt 4y agoBut how will marketing determine the effectiveness of their efforts if I don't "just add a single line of code" for every social media company to our website? </sarcasm>
- sdoering 4y agoIt is even worse than that. Google nowadays still uses this argument telling you that only this way they can optimize your ad placement towards Conversions. While at the same time telling you (in their documentation) that due to script blockers and gdpr they just estimate (using more fancy terms and talking about ML & AI) the Conversions they report (and use for optimization). They basically tell you: Trust us - we estimate your success in the best of your interest. As if they were a neutral party in that equation.