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Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

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Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

#71

I'm surprised at the almost universal outrage over this. I assumed this was in response to the whole election interference campaign and related issues, i.e. preventing bots from blasting out content and predetermined times or in response to specific keywords in the news, things like that. So this seems like a step in the direction of ensuring actual humans are doing these things (or at least make it slightly more dif…

I'm surprised at the outrage too. Your personal profile on Facebook is supposed to be a place to post your holiday photos, pictures of your kids, updates about events in your life etc, not mindless automated stuff like this. Part of the reason Instagram has surged in popularity lately is because it's generally real humans posting the content rather than endless automated shitposts (I'm not saying they don't exist, bu…

> Your personal profile on Facebook is supposed to be a place to post your holiday photos, pictures of your kids, updates about events in your life etc, not mindless automated stuff like this.

Sure, but that doesn't mean you want it always entered on Facebook. When I post an Instagram photo, I'd like it to show up on Facebook as well (ironically, and totally as expected, this one will apparently still work). When I write a review on Goodreads, I'd like it to be reposted on Facebook automatically, without me having to copy-paste it. Etc.

This move is just further walling up Facebook's ecosystem.

Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't they blanket-deauth all Facebook apps (or maybe just ones authed before this year, or sth.) instead? People would fix the apps they still use. And really, publishing apps on FB is not a real problem; apps exfiltrating data is.

Apps exfiltrating is one problem. Bots posing as real people to rile up racial/political/etc. tensions is another, and this approach helps a bit there.

This won't help much. Evil Enemies of Freedom and US Way of Life will continue to hire low-paid workers in poor countries to post manually, with or without help of whatever Selenium/mbasic.facebook.com automation someone will promptly create.

Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

#74
post #43

I may be swimming in the opposite direction, but I like to see that go. I left Twitter (well, abandoned my account) years ago, tired of the excessive noise and progressive loss of relevance to me. Seeing tweets on the FB feed always makes the author seem lazy and desperate to have a presence in every social media site, just because. I know that the change won't stop all of that but will certainly reduce it. FB isn't…

> seem lazy and desperate [...] every social media Wow that's quite the overreach. I mean, if not wanting to do the same thing twice means being lazy, and wanting to reach people who are in one media but not the other means being desperate, then... I'm totally guilty! But I don't really agree with either premise.

Yup. Not only that, but this is basically missing the whole point of computing, which is for humans to not do the stuff computers are better at.

Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

#75

Apparently, a (for better or worse) big part of the web just lost a significant interoperability feature. Shame. And a reminder of how life with SaaS platforms looks like. You have little ability to improve things for yourself.

Meh... this should make facebook way less spammy. I approve. People can still share things organically.

Majority of spam comes from Facebook pages and groups, not individual profiles. Which, apparently, this change does not affect.

Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use this feature. It meant that I didn't have to log in to Facebook to re-post the thing I already posted on Twitter. If I still used this feature, I'd be upset that Facebook just took a step to make my life a little bit harder. In general, I care more about my own convenience than some incremental step against bots that probably won't noticeably impact my experience on the site.

I agree - I see a lot of small business, even individuals from music/art circles what don't want to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping "followers" up to date... If they can create and share once but have the computers syndicate that to the places that matter, they've found a happy balance. The issue with the current model is that it's easily abused by bad actors (pun intended) to cram content down people's ey…

I haven't used Facebook in a while, but can't you just not follow the accounts that spam bad content?

Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

#77

First Alex Jones. The this. Way to go Facebook! /s

Too bad. My favorite part about Facebook was the false assertions that shooting victims were paid actors, and the never-ending torrent of twitter's recycled hashtag spam.

Good riddance. Got to leave more space for marketoid spam from Facebook pages. How dare an individual automate their posting and crowd out what's important.

Re: Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

#78
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This includes most blog integrations, eg. being able to configure Wordpress to post a plug on your personal FB when you write something in your blog.

Yes, this was part of their "security" change after the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Although, any site using their JS API can still get your name, email and a unique ID, posting is now restricted via a FB modal or pop-up (which is blocked by more recent browsers). I think this happened in May/June of this year, IIRC.

The change went live on August 1, where they deprecated the "publish_actions" permission.
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