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You’re just rephrasing the original question. Ok so why would someone design a tool that takes screenshots if tiny blurbs of text? It truly boggles the mind.

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What speaks against having such a tool? I'm thinking of news sites that want to give their readers the impression of the original tweet without embedding the remote content. This would've avoided the current situation where many articles are useless because the tweets they discuss are no longwr available.

Okay, maybe a bit of CSS could do the same. But this requires someone to change the CSS. Adding an image can be done by any journalist and is mostly risk-free. You cannot break the looks of other articles this way.

This, of course, is only to argue why such a tool exists.

I think this comes down to some brilliant twitter marketing. They pushed the idea that to cover tweets you need to convey the look of tweets, which at a minimum pushes their brand, but also lets them embed trackers all over the web.

For any other medium an article can just quote the content.

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