Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages
help.twitter.com
help.twitter.com
More details: https://betanews.com/2018/08/02/twitter-facebook-crossposts-...
I don't want Facebook, nor Twitter. Just take my email address and send me your content, or offer an RSS feed.
EDIT: Anyone know if this kills Buffer and other social feed managers?
Only temporarily. Once folks move off of Facebook and onto something better, they'll realize that this was a Good Thing overall.
While that would be nice, I'm not holding my breath.
Although, any site using their JS API can still get your name, email and a unique ID, posting is now restricted via a FB modal or pop-up (which is blocked by more recent browsers).
I think this happened in May/June of this year, IIRC.
Large companies, particularly in the EU, are not allowed to throw their weight around to privilege their own services and apps.
Google prioritizing their offerings over other vendors on a search they control is far different than "Can't post on Facebook from Twitter".
Google has put itself forward as a fairly agnostic search. No one signs up to be indexed by Google. It works more like a common good. So when Google starts offering a service, then puts its own offerings before others in its search. That's dirty pool.
But that's not what's happening here. Facebook is a platform to connect with other people who are also on Facebook. It doesn't purport to be a central hub for anything but Facebook. It's just not allowing Twitter (and others) to post on users' behalf.
The argument here is that Facebook is a natural monopoly and by only allowing Instagram to post automatically to a users timeline, they are leveraging that legal natural monopolies power to advantage Instagram.
Microsoft had a monopoly on the retail operating system space and leveraged that monopoly to force vendors into bad positions that excluded other operating systems a shot on a fair market. They also used their position to push their products to the detriment of other competitors.
As far as I can tell, Facebook just has a monopoly on Facebook. Which is to be expected since Facebook is Facebook.
I asked how would this trigger anti-trust proceedings because Facebook is not abusing a monopoly position, they're just not letting other services post to their site.
You responded by basically saying "Yeah, but people think they are". Which really doesn't address anything. So I asked more directly what do they have a monopoly on.
I know people think they're a monopoly. I think those people are wrong. At least until they can tell me a monopoly on what.
I thought Facebook was on the stock market...
Perhaps the thought is that people will go and post directly to Facebook instead? Or it could be a way of reducing noice/spam.
The way I read it, people who deliberately want to cross-post tweets are essentially collateral damage.
Simply: Apps exfiltrating data can be prevented almost entirely using sane permissions, sufficient security, oh and not willingly turning a blind eye, helps. That is about read permissions and entirely not what this news is about.
Bots and troll-armies posting to polarise and increase tensions, are indeed a write permission problem, and superficially appear to be what this news is about. Except that as long as humans can post on FB, so can troll armies and bots. This only takes away capability for the small to medium scale ease of use. Any determined adversary wouldn't have been using these capabilities anyway because it's too easy to detect as not organic.
Surely the automated blackhat and/or psy-op bot farms use automated browsers, headless browsers, key macro scripts, or whatever to simulate an actual human user interacting at human speed--just 1000s in parallel. I mean it's not rocket science and as soon as you're running a slightly larger operation it pays to just do it properly right away.
This news changes nothing for the bot farms on missions that had to fly below the radar already anyway.
It also means they can more easily charge companies for posting (who are the ones most likely to want to post to several services).
You'd think the posters in this thread have some kind of business interest in this functionality based on the way they're reacting.
We are clearly not looking at the same subset of Instagram. I don't know anybody that actually uses it to post real content; it's just an endless feed of meme shitposting to laugh at.
Interesting to see what the kids are up to.
Sure, but that doesn't mean you want it always entered on Facebook. When I post an Instagram photo, I'd like it to show up on Facebook as well (ironically, and totally as expected, this one will apparently still work). When I write a review on Goodreads, I'd like it to be reposted on Facebook automatically, without me having to copy-paste it. Etc.
This move is just further walling up Facebook's ecosystem.
(I think in reality, my view of Facebook as a tool for messaging and looking at photos is probably fundamentally different than a lot of the upset people posting here who seemed to use Facebook for promoting their blogs or personal twitter brand or whatever)
In general, I care more about my own convenience than some incremental step against bots that probably won't noticeably impact my experience on the site.
If they can create and share once but have the computers syndicate that to the places that matter, they've found a happy balance.
The issue with the current model is that it's easily abused by bad actors (pun intended) to cram content down people's eye sockets.
Well, if they are making a push to lock people into their platform, this might make me back off further.
¹https://faq.buffer.com/article/985-publish-facebook-profiles
Edit:
I'm thinking more and more that I will probably be deleting my Facebook account sometime in the not too distant future. I'd really rather be doing all of my information sharing / browsing / interaction using a pure Open Web[1] oriented platform and that's exactly what Facebook is not.
Not sure exactly what form this will take, but I want to move to a platform which is not a walled garden, and is based on open and decentralized standards like RSS/Atom, ActivityStrea.ms, ActivityPub, RDF, FOAF, SIOC, XMPP, NNTP, SMTP, and the like.
A proper Web platform should allow anyone to participate on their own terms without some corporation being able to arbitrarily decide the terms of what you can do, while simultaneously profiting from the resale of our personal data.
Maybe this will mean Mastodon, maybe I'll go back to a self-hosted Roller based blog, etc. I already self-host an ejabberd server for XMPP messaging, so that will probably be part of what I do going forward.
To me, twitter is utterly cancerous and Facebook is where I see friends and family. To others, they use Twitter for communication with their business network, and Facebook for friends. And so on. The idea of blasting from one to the other, other than in the case of businesses (which I'm not much concerned about, they can suck it up) seems odd.
Obviously there's the occasional "tell twitter AND facebook that, after 10 years involved with this organization, I will be moving on.." but those rare cross posts can be done manually. It's the always-posting-multiple-places-as-part-of-a-personal-account that perplexes me.
The outrage isn't just about Twitter though. It's also about that you now can't do IFTTT->Facebook, Buffer->Facebook, or whatever other app you were using (including your own)->Facebook.
(Speaking of Buffer, did this move just kill their business?)
I'm not going to copy-paste every tweet into Facebook, so I suspect I'll basically go silent on that platform. Which sucks. And if I'm not an active part of the Facebook community, I'll probably visit facebook.com very rarely.
Much easier than I expected, I still check my facebook once every few weeks, but the content on FB was garbage.
My usage of Facebook would probably increase if there was a way to filter-on site-keywords in and out of my newsfeed instead of relying on a browser extension.
As it is, I'm constantly hiding posts, snoozing or unfollowing people altogether-thinking "Fine Facebook, if you want to use algorithms based on how I use the site to customize my newsfeed, customize this".
Seems the site hasn't yet picked up that I don't want everyone's oversimplified political hot takes (but I like one Nicholas Cage meme and suddenly FB reacts "Would you like ALL the Cage recommendations??" No, not really). I like checking in on my friends, and that's the extant of how useful FB is to me, but there's a real fatigue to the political fatalism front and center.
So, twitter it is. So I can get my oversimplified sports hot takes. Those are at least humorous and entertaining.
If a social network comes along and grants me that kind of control, I would gladly beta that.
Well done! That will show them.
Wow that's quite the overreach. I mean, if not wanting to do the same thing twice means being lazy, and wanting to reach people who are in one media but not the other means being desperate, then... I'm totally guilty! But I don't really agree with either premise.
Glad to see it go away. Personally, I was getting tired of others’ auto posts too.
Exactly. Hopefully this will nudge more people to start running smaller, more regionalized (maybe down to the level of the individual) instances of Open Source platforms, based on Open Standards, to replace the kind of functionality people have been getting from the Facebooks and Twitters and Instagrams of the world. That would be a Good Thing.
Also at work we Tweeted Facebook activity.
I'll have to use Twitter now instead of just using Facebook. Is the hope from Facebook that people will just not bother with Twitter?
Why haven't Facebook notified us wrt business use that Tweets will no longer be pulled in?
Heck, I wish it was more common to consider if what you're posting is really worth interrupting all of your followers.
I use it to post pictures to twitter whenever I post to instagram, but there's a lot of nice facebook <-> twitter functionality too.
Same reason Apple can use private APIs but no one else can.
Way to go Facebook! /s
Really, I don't understand how this is news. It's what was going to happen, everyone with half a brain has known that since facebook started being a thing, and anyone who cared could trivially avoid it. So how is it that there are still people who apparently care that this happens?
Just because something isn't a surprise to you, doesn't mean its not news. I know that wild fires will inevitably happen, but I'm happy that they are reported on the news.
> So how is it that there are still people who apparently care that this happens?
So how is it that there are still people who apparently don't realize that the 2B+ users of facebook don't know everything they know.