I had a similar issue for the tweet embedding, so I wrote a Node.js script to download tweets via their API, and construct the HTML and CSS necessary to display it on my own website, without needing to include their JavaScript: https://github.com/umaar/better-twitter-embed

As an example, to display 442 tweets on one page, it's around 2.4mb of network download - most of that is from media which some of the tweets use.

This way, text is selectable and links can be clicked.