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Comment by PaulMest | Hacker News Reader

Facebook did not purposely remove the cross-posted tweets. Twitter removed their app from the Facebook platform which had this as an unfortunate result.

Source: https://www.axios.com/how-cross-posted-tweets-disappeared-fr...

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> Twitter removed their app from the Facebook platform which had this as an unfortunate result.

> TechCrunch also heard from a source with understanding of the situation that the deletion of the app took Facebook by surprise, as well as the fact that Twitter didn’t immediately tell them to restore the content

These statements seem to indicate that Twitter was to blame for removing their app. However, from the axios link:

> ...the Twitter app for the Facebook platform was essentially made useless earlier this month once Facebook officially removed the ability to cross-post.

> With the app's sole function eliminated, Twitter decided to delete it from the Facebook platform, having no reason to think that doing so would remove old tweets that were cross-posted.

> It's not clear whether Facebook knew this would happen, either.

Looks like Facebook did not know that Twitter would delete their app, and Twitter did not know that deleting the app would delete the content. I can understand why Facebook would have such a policy for deleted apps, and I can understand why Twitter doesn't want to have a "dead" app that's active on the Facebook platform. They probably just ought to have spoken to each other.

> They probably just ought to have spoken to each other.

Twitter probably should have just done the dive to verify what deleting an app does. I would guess this is mentioned somewhere in the docs.

Ok. So I spent a while on https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ and in particular on https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/ trying to find documentation on deleting your app. Wasn't very successful, and the search-box on the site wasn't very helpful either. In fact, the most useful documentation I could find on deleting a facebook app as a developer was on stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9962072/how-can-i-delete...).

Perhaps someone who is a facebook app developer can chip in to say if this info is in their docs somewhere...

I stopped developing Facebook apps a few years ago, but when we wound down our games, we did not delete the apps fearing precisely this problem, or related future problems like app name impersonation, squatting, etc. It just seemed too easy to imagine scenarios where deleting the apps could cause trouble, and the docs were useless for this.

We simply turned the apps off (don't remember exact wording). Last I checked my dev email, I was still getting emails from Facebook warning of API changes and informing of our games' metrics and activity (!), so it is true that deleting an app is cleaner.

Facebook probably shouldn't be destructive by default..

I've always asked this question, who exactly are "They"?

The person at Twitter about to press the delete button and a member of Facebook's developer relations team.

They will almost certainly have assigned reps in the other company they can reach out to for things like this. They may be competitors but they're still active on the other platforms.

> almost certainly

Present situation leads me to believe otherwise..

So we have two billion-dollar companies here, with billions of users, and not one person thought about sending an email to check what would happen.

The title has been changed to "Twitter’s deletion of its Facebook app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear" on techcrunch.

The Hacker News title should be updated as well.

It should, but since the mods appear to be in one geo, HN goes unmoderated half of the time.

Given the actual content of the update, the "temporarily" sounds more hopeful than factual.

"Move Fast and Break Things"

This is a great example of big tech companies not thinking about the consequences of their actions.

I guess that works or might have worked when Cybersecurity wasn’t as equally important as it is now. In addition, people are getting smarter and more aware of what happens on the “internet’s” these days. So that approach of allowing anyone accessing everyone information had to run its course and reach the end of line.

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