Maybe I've missed something huge, but having a URL is a central part of- at the very least, twitter's cards. The scenario is, user posts a link to the New York

Maybe I've missed something huge, but having a URL is a central part of- at the very least, twitter's cards. The scenario is, user posts a link to the New York Times on twitter (as they do), the new york times has some level of control over the automatically generated preview that appears next to that tweet on twitter.