To be clear, Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post _anything_ to a personal profile.
More details: https://betanews.com/2018/08/02/twitter-facebook-crossposts-...
More details: https://betanews.com/2018/08/02/twitter-facebook-crossposts-...
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...
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.
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.