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> And the t.co example isn't actually useful for spam prevention Don't take my word for it, that's how Twitter described it when they launched it here: https:/
by dewey 2y ago
> And the t.co example isn't actually useful for spam prevention
Don't take my word for it, that's how Twitter described it when they launched it here: https://blog.x.com/en_us/a/2012/shutting-down-spammers https://blog.x.com/en_us/a/2012/shutting-down-spammers
From a scale perspective it also seems a lot easier to remove one redirect from happening vs. finding every Tweet that contains a certain url you want to remove.
> Additionally, we now use our link shortener (t.co) to analyze whether a tweeted link leads to malware or malicious content. This helps us prevent users from visiting malicious links and helps us shut down hundreds of thousands of abusive accounts.
- swores 2y agoYou're misunderstanding the bit of that blog post that you've quoted - it only says that starting to analyse t.co links for malicious content is a good thing for reducing malicious content. It says nothing about whether that job is easier than if they started doing the analysing without having a link shortening system in place. And in fact it goes to show that spam prevention wasn't a motivating factor in their creating t.co shortener in the first place, since they only started analysing for malicious links later than they started shortening links. It is possible that their task was made easier by having the t.co system in place - impossible to know without understanding engineering details of how Twitter and t.co work - but it's not a claim they've made publicly, nor a reason for their deciding to use shortened links.