by epeus on 4/6/22, 3:38 AM with 245 comments
by tofuahdude on 4/6/22, 6:51 AM
Calling it "altering the public record" is a little hyperbolic imo. If you want to act as a repository for the public record, you better use your own system. Twitter is under no obligation to retain this kind of stuff on your behalf.
I'm not trying to say that this is right or wrong, just that these are the facts of the matter when you engage with a company's code and terms of service.
by blendergeek on 4/6/22, 12:45 PM
By changing the behavior of the javascript, without even updating the documentation, Twitter has broken every rule of being a good distributor of third-party code. In a similar vein, any third party code could at any time do any number of malicious things. Just because I didn't pay Twitter for the privilege of running their code and just because I embedded their code in my website does not make it okay for them to start distributing malware to modify my website to their liking.
There are lots of other malicious things Twitter could have the javascript do. Twitter could start showing ads before and after all quoted tweets. This would also conflict with the documentation and would be malicious.
by WatchDog on 4/6/22, 6:33 AM
At a minimum, it should probably be embedded in a sandboxed iframe.
Just taking a screenshot, and linking to the tweet, seems like a more robust solution, that won't randomly stop working, and doesn't have the same privacy issues.
by car_analogy on 4/6/22, 3:49 AM
by paxys on 4/6/22, 7:08 AM
by riffic on 4/6/22, 6:23 AM
An apostrophe as a possessive marker in its is nonstandard:
by slater on 4/6/22, 3:50 AM
by jazzyjackson on 4/6/22, 8:08 AM
It doesn't have to be this way. Either the individual or the platform could cryptographically sign content to prove that it really happened. I guess Twitter would prefer a plausible deniability. If anyone screenshots you saying something you regret, you can just say it was forged.
by thunderbong on 4/6/22, 7:31 AM
So, IMHO, the title and the post doesn't make any sense. Twitter isn't editing anyone's site. You have chosen to embed some content of Twitter on yours and it is perfectly fine if they chose to remove it.
by ki_ on 4/6/22, 8:29 AM
And i think the whole "they edited my page" statement is ridiculous. You EMBED a part of twitter into your page. You know it can change. If you embed a youtube video, and the owner deletes it, it wont play anymore. obviously.
by oauea on 4/6/22, 12:36 PM
Malware is defined by Wikipedia as:
> Malware (a portmanteau for malicious software) is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, deprive users access to information or which unknowingly interferes with the user's computer security and privacy.
This script distributed by twitter is software intentionally designed to cause a disruption to a server and to deprive users access to information.
by ThePhysicist on 4/6/22, 7:29 AM
Luckily GDPR seems to have a chilling effect on recklessly embedding such stuff without thinking about privacy or security implications. Personally I hope that in a few years third-party embeds will mostly be a thing of the past.
by ChrisArchitect on 4/6/22, 5:35 PM
Tweet embeds are a live link to the Twitter system to show a tweet. To show the actual tweet from the Twitter platform. If the tweet doesn't exist, there's nothing to show. No one said it should maintain some kind of 'copy' of old data on your site.
by taspeotis on 4/6/22, 10:19 AM
Apparently the “contract” that Twitter would preserve the text of a deleted tweet was a tweet from some random employee.
by WorldMaker on 4/6/22, 6:31 PM
I hope they add a simple check if the element has children or not to fix the regression, but I work on an app where some sort of fallback UI for deleted Tweets is a welcome change, even if "blank Tweet card" isn't a huge improvement, it's still a small win to get some hard-to-fix-on-our-side UI complaints off the backlog.
by account-5 on 4/6/22, 10:41 AM
My non-expert, likely useless, take on this:
Don't use Twitter's technology. If you're interested in quoting a tweet to create a public take a screenshot, copy of the text, quote it and provide a link. Simple.
If part of your post links, or portals, to another site you don't control it's not part of your blog/post/site. Complaining when remote content changes is pointless. You're not capturing what was when you link to remote content managed by someone else you're capturing something live, it's not a public record. It isn't quoting anything.
by gumby on 4/6/22, 5:50 PM
Now site ToS usually say that they can change the terms whenever they want. But that's going forward: something you wrote in the past should be under the contemporaneous terms.
So I wonder if someone could successfully sue under California law. If successful, it would be a great improvement to consumer rights.
by bussetta on 4/6/22, 8:15 AM
by raverbashing on 4/6/22, 7:58 AM
(it is correct on the site itself)
> That widgets.js script looks for blockquotes with the class="twitter-tweet" on, and replaces them with a Twitter branded iframe to confirm that it is a real tweet
And that's how most libraries work? I don't see an issue. Yes, if you delete the tweet it seems they changed the behaviour (and that might be an actual bug) but still...
by jdrc on 4/6/22, 7:02 AM
by fay59 on 4/6/22, 7:50 AM
by dheera on 4/6/22, 7:06 AM
If you cared about JS injection why would you embed anything?!
by throwuxiytayq on 4/6/22, 9:52 AM
by ec109685 on 4/6/22, 6:33 AM
End result will be much uglier pages.
by dustinmoris on 4/6/22, 7:49 AM
Own your data, own your blogs, own your words, own what you create/write/do on the web. Don't rely on third party services uphold a common sense contract or what most people would expect is the ethical/correct/good thing to do.
by rini17 on 4/6/22, 8:16 AM
I can see the publishers unhappy and actively obstructing such a solution though.
by tester89 on 4/7/22, 3:18 PM
by jdrc on 4/6/22, 10:33 AM
by mlatu on 4/6/22, 7:45 AM
maybe there should be an open and distributed ACTUAL public record? have we finally found an actual usecase for blockchains?
by meatsauce on 4/6/22, 1:45 PM
We need to go back to the days when sticks and stones broke bones; when words were correctly not "violence" and that your right to not be insulted existed solely in that self-important (but empty) cavern between your ears.
by TomGullen on 4/6/22, 7:37 AM
by iepathos on 4/6/22, 6:48 AM
by smokey_circles on 4/6/22, 8:02 AM
Oh come off it already. What a remarkably brain dead opinion.
Twitter _is not a public utility_. It owes you _nothing_. Their property, their decision. That simple.
I do have an issue with the idea of their JS manipulating your own website but fuck off with this "Twitter is a public service" argument.
- They don't have to give you an account
- You are not entitled to make demands of them
- You can always use another service
Goddamned children. Enough already.
by peanut_worm on 4/6/22, 3:10 PM
by parksy on 4/6/22, 8:33 AM
What this probably calls for and maybe something is out there is some service that can embed, archive, and track changes to a tweet or social media post. You'd embed the same way, but the archive will fetch and cache the content. It could then serve up the original version, as well as a timeline of changes.
The right to be forgotten has merit though, and I can see twitter's logic there and probably they're under pressure via GDPR or something. So any archival or cache service would need to take that into account. Various countries and districts have varying laws on what is and isn't official public record too, so it seems like managing that could be the function of a dedicated archival service.
by vixen99 on 4/6/22, 8:17 AM
by demarq on 4/6/22, 10:33 AM
What contract?
by Cgwftsn on 4/6/22, 12:00 PM
by iforgotpassword on 4/6/22, 7:19 AM
Just with the Facebook like-Button, you're exposing your visitors to the tracking of Twitter.
For what? Just so you can quickly copy one snippet and be done with it, instead of manually copying author name, content and link and spending 10 seconds to format this yourself.
I wish I had something constructive to say, but this always seemed like a totally unnecessary "feature" with a lot of downsides. Instead of embedding 280 characters in your website you make it download an order of magnitude more from somewhere else and then execute code to display those characters in a way someone else deems appropriate.
by Zardoz84 on 4/6/22, 6:53 AM
