Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

Re:Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social by ctvo on Friday June 03, 2022 @11:16AM (#31609452)

A link preview adds value to those reading the posts. Because it can sometimes fail to process a link and prevent users from posting links is not a sign of sure malice, it's possibly incompetence (in the way the system was designed or implemented, in the business rules of requiring it to validate successfully before a link can be posted, etc.).

I'm a little lost at what your point is because if you think the above is malice, there's malice in every poorly implemented feature. Say Instagram does a rough check to ensure no nudity is contained in the images you're posting and that system goes down preventing you from posting to your own IG -- that too is malice?

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Re:Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social by tehlike on Friday June 03, 2022 @12:15PM (#31610362)

Actually, a fraudster can design their system such that when preview service is the one rendering the page, it returns an error, but when a legit user is making the request, it may proceed showing bad stuff.

This is known as cloaking.

Safe thing to do is to block the submission instead of letting it through anyway, or potentially downrank the tweet, or graylist or whatever, or put it into failed queue for investigation, or something along thoselines.

I think crowd here would be delighted when twitter allows spam links because they figured out a way to fool the preview service in some ways.

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