No, Facebook is NOT Blocking Previews of Conservative Propogandistic Tweets
The Venn diagram of people who would vote for an idiot like Trump vs people who don't understand how the internet works would be a perfect circle.
America, this is your brain on right-wing conspiracy theories.
X formerly known as Twitter (I think that's its full name now) has seen a number of bizarre changes under Elon Musk. From unbanning a neo-nazi to killing third-party apps, it's been a sudden and drastic change to say the very least. In the case of the latter, I believe it's because Musk views these apps as freeloaders. Perhaps because, like my aging parents, he too doesn't understand how these sorts of things work. Maybe he shouldn't be running a company like X formerly known as Twitter.
But that brings me to today's post from my mother:
Where do I begin? Let's see... if Facebook didn't want you to share this link, don't you think they'd cause the post to fail or for the link to get stripped away? Why would they only hide the preview? Anyone with an ounce of common sense should be skeptical of the claim that this is intentional on Facebook's part.
So what's actually happening here? Facebook generates its previews by crawling the page that is being linked to. Most sites these days have metadata in them for web crawlers to read so they can make sense of the page. Most sites welcome well-behaving bots because their visiting leads to new avenues of being discovered on other services such as Google Search or Amazon Alexa. But would it surprise you that the man who killed third-party apps also has a problem with other services scraping Twitter's content? Because yeah, that's exactly what's happened.
We can see it for ourselves, actually. To control what web crawlers are allowed to look at, websites can provide a robots.txt file. This file lets web crawlers know what parts of the site they're allowed to scrape. Twitter's can be found here. Notice this section:
User-agent: facebookexternalhit
Disallow: *
And here is the culprit. This rule forbids the Facebook web crawler from visiting any page on Twitter. Not just conspiracy theories, all pages are blocked and won't generate a preview. And Facebook isn't responsible for the missing preview.
Let this be an example of what the conspiracy theorist mindset does to reasoning and logic. Oh, and the tweet my mom linked to? Totally stupid. But perhaps that's a subject for another day. 13 words in my mom's Facebook post caused me to write 400, after all.
