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Comment by iancarroll | Hacker News Reader

Some people have a problem with t.co but remember, Twitter builds 100% of their anti spam and virus protection into t.co, so bypassing it exposes you to security issues.

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This is bullshit, If they wanted to actually do that they would just remove the links from the actual tweet.

Not entirely. They'd have to invalidate multiple levels of caching and then dynamically update all feeds that could have the link displayed.

Or, with t.co, they disable the link from a single source and the problem is solved.

Gosh, then it must be impossible to delete a tweet!

If it's for secruity concerns why can you not send a t.co link in DM?

And how hard would it be for an attacker to use this logic?

  if crawler == twitter
    normal website
  else
    insert virus/spam
  fi

I am strongly averse to redirector links because of the security risk. You can't trust the destination.

I don't think it is an automated process. Rather, when there's an outbreak, twitter uses their control over t.co to contain it.

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