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Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social
- sillysaurusx 4y agoNot surprising. Social networks have been known to block smaller competitors. After all, it’s their right to as a private company. Isn’t that how that works? Everyone always says that, and this is a case of that.
- nkozyra 4y ago> After all, it’s their right to as a private company. Isn’t that how that works? Everyone always says that, and this is a case of that. Unless I missed it, until you wrote this nobody had argued it wasn't their right to do this.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoIt's their right but it's still crummy. I want Section 230 to be repealed.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y agoI don’t know what section 230 repeal has to do with it. Companies would still be able to block random links like this if section 230 is repealed; they’d probably do it more often.
- mikeyouse 4y agoRepealing 230 would literally kill large swaths of the internet. If platforms like Twitter or Reddit were legally responsible for what their users post, they would need to institute white lists to avoid being bankrupted. Can you imagine the amount of low-level casual defamation across the entirety of Facebook? Or Reddit? The amount of copyrighted material stolen and posted? There would be an overnight industry of people shadow-posting defamatory statements and then turning around and suing the platforms for hosting it. It's literally the dumbest idea possible.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 4y agoHeck, under the precedent that Section 230 was meant to overturn, Twitter could sue HN for a lot of what people are saying right here. I struggle to even engage with the idea sometimes because you're 100% right that it doesn't make sense.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dane-pgp 4y ago> It's literally the dumbest idea possible. Unless the aim was literally to destroy these large left-leaning, people-empowering, highly profitable, internationally reaching businesses. Now imagine which political party and which geopolitical adversary would like to make the internet less liberal, silence the powerless, make American tax revenue lower, and make more space for authoritarian voices on the world stage.
- aiilns 4y agoFacebook, twitter, etc left-leaning in the US sense where left is right and right is near the edge of the right spectrum I get. But people-empowering? These large platforms are very much anti-democratic and anti-empowering people. Even more, subverting peoples wills about what they buy by managing what they see and algorithmically trying to guide what they should think is very much anti people. Any people empowering is merely a side effect and not at all the purpose
- dane-pgp 4y agoI see what you're saying, and there's definitely reason to question which entities have gained the most influence from social media (out of corporations, governments, or activists). As for "the purpose" of social media, I suppose a simple reductive answer would be "to make money", but there were (and I think still are) people who are idealistic about social media giving a voice to the voiceless, even if you think that, in practice, commercial messages and misinformation end up having a bigger and more negative effect. A thought experiment I think is useful is to imagine how Western political discourse could have been shaped (by politicians and the traditional media) if grassroots movements couldn't form and raise awareness through things like "hashtag activism".[0] The fact that authoritarian countries invest resources in censoring or banning social media also seems to confirm that they see it as a threat rather than a harmless distraction. [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hashtagactivism https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hashtagactivism
- input_sh 4y agoIn other words, you want every website to be held liable for all user generated content on their platform, which would benefit every large social media (because smaller ones wouldn't be able to afford to moderate every single post), leading to them becoming even more of a monopoly? Or do you have something concrete in mind on what to replace it with? Because just repealing it would lead to a much different Internet than it is today — and not in a good way.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- baisq 4y ago>In other words, you want every website to be held liable for all user generated content on their platform, which would benefit every large social media (because smaller ones wouldn't be able to afford to moderate every single post), leading to them becoming even more of a monopoly? In the EU it works well: the only social networks that exist are American :P
- input_sh 4y ago> Or do you have something concrete in mind on what to replace it with? In the EU that would be Digital Services Act, chapter two of which offers websites similar protection to the Section 230. It's gonna be voted on soon™. At the moment the EU has precedence in the opposite direction, with an Estonian news site Delfi having been held liable for anonymous user comments made on their platform: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delfi_AS_v._Estonia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delfi_AS_v._Estonia
- legalcorrection 4y agoNo, this is arguably "monopolization", which is illegal under the Sherman Act. Even the 9th Circuit, which has adopted an implausibly broad reading of 230, does not think that 230 is a defense against antitrust claims.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoHmm. How interesting. Monopolization, you say. I’ll have to remember that. Well, I’m just glad https://www.laarc.io https://www.laarc.io is unblocked here now after many years.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> this is arguably "monopolization", which is illegal under the Sherman Act What does Twitter have a monopoly on? Twitter users? By that definition by local dry cleaner has a monopoly on me.
- rob74 4y agoDo you have lots of followers at your local dry cleaner? Posted a lot of notes on their walls that people like to read?
- sillysaurusx 4y agoSuppose you wanted to launch a new social network. Where would you get your users? Not being able to talk about it on existing social networks is basically a death sentence for growth. I saw it first hand.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Where would you get your users? The 80+ percent of Americans who don't use Twitter might be a start [1][2]. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2013/11/04/twitter-news-consumers-young-mobile-and-educated/ https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2013/11/04/twitter-ne... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/970911/monetizable-daily-active-twitter-users-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/970911/monetizable-daily...
- lapcat 4y ago> After all, it’s their right to as a private company. Why do people always use the term "private company"? Twitter is a publicly owned corporation. If the Musk deal goes through, it'll be private. But I'm not sure what work the word "private" is supposed to be doing.
- basisword 4y agoThere are different types of private company. You have mentioned two of them. Twitter is is a publicly traded private company.
- cmeacham98 4y ago"Private company", in this context, means "not the government". The opposite would be "public sector", referring to the government or companies it owns/runs.
- lapcat 4y agoExcept, how many government owned companies are there in the US? What's the point in saying "private company" if 99.99+% of companies are private?
- mypalmike 4y agoTwitter is a company. Is that statement sufficient to stop further nitpicking?
- lapcat 4y agoI think there's a kind of ideology behind the phrase that personifies companies, giving them "rights" that become even more important than individual human rights. And there's the weird idea that companies can do whatever they want, despite the mountains of government regulation of corporate behavior. Almost every use of "private company" is in contrast to a publicly traded company. Except when people start talking about "rights", and then they're apparently using it in a different way, which I find very odd and ideological.
- miduil 4y agoAffected are https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social and https://mastodon.social/about https://mastodon.social/about. Linking to actual user content actually works, so unlikely a problem of user generated content violating TOS but Twitter pro-actively avoiding supporting the platform.
- bombcar 4y agoThis is the kind of thing that's interesting to document for a potential anti-trust case. Blocking the entire domain because it's "spammy" could be argued as fair - but only blocking the main links is more suspect.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoantitrust? Is twitter a monopoly now?
- roamerz 4y agoIt’s the only Tweet in town.
- usr1106 4y agoWho are the competitors? What is their market share?
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoFacebook. Instagram. Reddit. Or do you just mean 300 character micro blogging platforms? Then yes. They have a monopoly on that industry.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- timbit42 4y agoA company doesn't have to be a monopoly to engage in monopolistic practices.
- jerojero 4y agoSurely this won't be the case anymore under Elon, right? ... right? On a serious note, do we know if there are other links that are blocked; like facebook or instagram or even onlyfans?
- egypturnash 4y agoIt is generally known in the artist circles I hang out in that Twitter’s algorithm loves to hide links to Patreon. They may also hide tweets that merely mention it, as well as other words crucial to the business of being an artist online like “commission”, which leads to creative misspellings like “Half off on c!miss!ons for my Petreon supporters this week!”. (Twitter loves to hide off-site links in general. Leaving the site means you’re not scrolling down your timeline and potentially seeing ads any more!)
- Volker_W 4y ago> Twitter loves to hide off-site links in general. Do you have a source/proof for me?
- egypturnash 4y agoEnough of my artist friends who pay closer attention to their analytics than I do have done tests and seen much lower engagement on offsite links that I take this as how things work but I can’t give you any particular links, sorry.
- jaywalk 4y agoYou do know that Elon does not currently (and may not ever) own Twitter, right?
- jen20 4y agoI think the GP does know that, and questions whether or not the policy would change under Musk’s stewardship.
- rvz 4y agoOk? They are a private company and they can block links that they don't like. Facebook has done the exact same thing and nothing happened. You are free to complain, criticise them, scream at these companies or protest, but like I have said many times before they will not change and it is futile to believe that they ever will as long as they 'moderate' or do whatever they want to do on their own platforms. So unsurprising this is.
- natly 4y agoThey're a private company and it's a shitty thing to do. No one is saying regulation should necessarily step in, but we don't have to like it and we shouldn't not complain and not talk about it just because of that.
- user3939382 4y ago> They are a private company I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire. In any case, guys - private company doesn't mean your behaviors and policies aren't constrained. There are innumerable laws that regulate corporate behavior and these can be expanded at any time. Corporate behavior can be constrained without limitation if the public so chooses.
- jaywalk 4y agoPeople being purely hypocritical when it benefits them is an all too common theme these days. As far as politics go, the only goal is power. Any steps towards gaining more power are right and just, regardless of how hypocritical they may be.
- superkuh 4y agoDefinitely. The act of incorportation has one goal: to abstract away risk and liability. Human people controlling the company will not be held liable for their actions or debts. But this comes with the trade-off of having to accept regulations. If you want to have full control over your property then do not incorporate and give the property to the corporate person. I can block links to mastadon on my truly private (ie, owned by a human person) website without consequence. "Private" corporate persons have more regulatory burdens for obvious reasons.
- tehlike 4y agoI bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time. Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.
- fartcannon 4y agoNowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. That is less harmful (some might say it's good) than the opposite, where big corps use our collective desire to forgive as a tool to exploit us. You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples negative emotions like twitter? No. I assume malice.
- tehlike 4y agoThat must be a hard life assuming things are working against you
- fartcannon 4y agoNah, its good. Lots of dopamine from being right all the time.
- tehlike 4y agoSounds good. You must also not be learning anything new. Let this be first.
- roenxi 4y agoIf you go over to the Wikipedia article for "genocides by death toll" we currently have 2 ongoing - one in Sudan, one Myanmar. And possibly Xianjing although that doesn't meet Wikipedia's standards. There are really few limits to how nasty a group of humans can get after they identify an in- and out- group. That is genocides, in 2022. The idea that a social media company is out to crush competitors and make money is really not that far out there, and certainly not an idea that can be reasonably mocked. These companies are going the way of the more corporate news organizations - they've got influence, they want to be political actors. They are not trustworthy.
- jmcnulty 4y agoMaybe there was some content on mastodon.social they didn't like. As they don't integrate with ActivityPub they can't block individual users so perhaps they chose to block the whole domain instead. It's not like they're cutting off the whole Fediverse. There are hundreds (thousands?) of mastadon instances and none of the others will be affected by this.
- danielcid 4y agoThey are also blocking noc.social (another mastodon instance). Wonder if more are impacted.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sequoia 4y agoA lot of people here are jumping to conclusions based on what could simply be a bug. Why not wait 24hrs and see if this is actually some policy or just a mistake.
- Kadin 4y agoBecause masquerading a controversial "feature" as a bug would be a good way to trial it, and see what the pushback from your users is like. Twitter doesn't have enough credibility left to deserve the benefit of the doubt.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoIt’s a feature until it goes viral then it’s a bug.
- tehlike 4y agoIt's a bug but HN crowds like to talk about the evil corps all the time.
- jaywalk 4y agoTwitter has done nothing to earn the benefit of the doubt in situations like this. Quite the opposite, in fact.
- tehlike 4y agoHaving been on the other side of things (not user generated content but advertisers etc), things are not as easy. Shit happens all the time.
- carapace 4y agoDo you remember the time that the "evil corps" conspired together to rip off their own developers to the tune of several billion dollars? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... (The suit was filed against Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, but it turned out that "dozens" of other tech companies got involved as well (Pando Daily had good coverage https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com/tag/techtopus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com... )) I figure these guys will do whatever they think they can get away with.
- ncrmro 4y agoI’m also a bit miffed that all outbound links are converted to a link shorter which Pihole (or one of the lists I added) has blocked. Can’t even copy the url to paste into browser
- 0daystock 4y agoMay I suggest nitter.net - an open source, javascript-free alternative front-end to twitter to help you wean off.
- dorianmariefr 4y agoWouldn't you still not be able to post the link as it's hitting the same servers/API?
- dpedu 4y agoWhen I attempt this I get a modal message saying: > We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more. Who are these partners, that apparently have the ability to block links on twitter? Edit: attempting to save the tweet as a draft results in a different error: "The content of your Tweet is invalid."
- debacle 4y agoTwitter's "Trusted Partner Platform" includes government organizations (including those outside the US), fortune 500s, etc.
- shp0ngle 4y agothey probably partner with some content filtering third parties for stuff like abuse blocking, child porn, copyright infringement, spam, you name it. I am wildly guessing that they outsource some of that stuff.
- INTPenis 4y agoThere was an issue a couple months ago where mastodon.social was blacklisted by some AV vendor. I seem to remember Eugen posting about this. I also believe some profile had been used as C&C, which could have caused the blacklist.
- supernes 4y ago"We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more." Harmful to whom, Twitter?
- dewey 4y agoThis is likely the same reason that sometimes links on FB can't be pasted. There's a spike in usage and some anti-spam mechanism blocks it. Which makes sense, but sometimes catches the wrong URL just like every spam filter. Give it a day, move along.
- TheDesolate0 4y agoDelete tiwtter, move along. FTFY
- dewey 4y agoTwitter is one of the platforms where you can still customize the experience pretty well. With custom lists and a third party client you can basically use it like an RSS reader if you want to. Their API you can pretty much do anything pretty easily, especially now with the new V2 API that expose a lot of features that were not available through an API just a few months ago. For example Twitter Bookmarks. I had a good experience using that a few months ago to build a service that sends you a weekly email of your Twitter bookmarks to your email inbox because I always forgot about them: https://getbirdfeeder.com https://getbirdfeeder.com
- danuker 4y ago> With custom lists and a third party client you can basically use it like an RSS reader if you want to. Or, you know, skip sharing your personal data and use an RSS reader.
- danielcid 4y agoThey are also blocking noc.social (another mastodon instance). Wonder if more are impacted.
- TheDesolate0 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rietta 4y agoThis most likely scenario is that over a decade ago, someone at Twitter copied a regex from Stack Overflow for URL validation and it has been there ever since.
- djyaz1200 4y agoHow cool to be able to comment out a competitor ;)
- alaricus 4y agoThis is textbook anti-competitive behaviour. I hope the EU regulators jump on this and give a hefty fine to Twitter.
- tehlike 4y agoYou really should learn laws better before claiming textbook anti competitive.
- derekzhouzhen 4y agoLinking to twitter is horrible too. Try this in your terminal: > curl https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1532710931590959104 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1532710931590959104 There is nothing of value in the static part of the html. For fuck's sake, there is no even title.
- baisq 4y agoSee if you can read this: https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser/status/97350916902105089 https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser/status/97350916902105089
- derekzhouzhen 4y agoOf course you can link to anything; I was talking about extracting useful information in a program for a richer link preview. A tweet is just a short text or a picture; it is trivial for twitter to have title, og:description, and og:image in their html like everyone else do.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- focusedone 4y agoSweet, that'll make it go away for sure.
- miduil 4y agoUpdate: They've restored mastodon.social but https://noc.social https://noc.social is still blocked