Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

[tehlike]

I bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time.

Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

[kps]

Hanlon's razor does a good job of masking malice. I have to assume that's accidental, though.

[personjerry]

To the people disagreeing with this - Twitter is orders of magnitude bigger than Mastodon.

Why would they draw attention to this tiny competitor with the entirety of their media attention?

Don't you think that Twitter knows that they have a lot of watchdogs?

[supernes]

If there's a backlash, then it's a bug. If no one cares, then it's a feature.

[MrPatan]

Yes, but: Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistiguishable from malice

[tjpnz]

I'm willing to bet Twitter has a whitelist for sites with user generated content to prevent whole domains from being hell banned if one person says something naughty. Perhaps Mastodon has yet to be added to this list?

[barkingcat]

We are in an age when incompetence and bugs have the same effect as malice, and by the time the bug is fixed, the malicious aftereffects have already taken place and irreparable.

Assuming malice by default is the very least we could do to fight back.

For example, a cop can be incompetent when accidentally firing a gun at a person, and they can be punished for the mistake, but the victim is already dead.

[pid-1]

> Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

My 100% baseless opinion is that most evil in big orgs comes from emergent behavior.

Ant colonies are capable of really complex stuff, even though individual ants are somewhat simple beings.

Likewise, a corp can do evil stuff even though all individuals who are part of it aren't actively seeking to do harm.

Since we can't ask a corp its intentions, it's fair to judge them for the consequences of their actions.

[can16358p]

Plausible deniability.

Design the system in a way that it'd pick up competitor links as spam (without directly blacklisting them explicitly) using fine-tuned training data.

In case of media attention, tell it's an error and ML algorithms are blackboxes, and take action to "whitelist" those domains only when needed.

Yeah, we buy it, Twitter.

[ekianjo]

> Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

I find this to be a stupid way to look at things. Incompetence and malice are not mutually exclusive.

[vel0city]

I've been trying to make an email with a gTLD my primary personal email address. Its so annoying having so many forms say "that's not a valid email!" just because they didn't get the message things like .ninja, .dev, .duck, .fun are all valid TLDs these days. No, their form says emails can only be .com, .net, .org, .mil, or maybe a handful of ccTLDs.

[alaricus]

It doesn't matter either way, the end result is the same.

[saurik]

Building systems that occasionally set themselves up for mistakes like this is the malice.

[fartcannon]

Nowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. That is less harmful (some might say it's good) than the opposite, where big corps use our collective desire to forgive as a tool to exploit us.

You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples negative emotions like twitter? No. I assume malice.

[miduil]

Affected are https://mastodon.social and https://mastodon.social/about. Linking to actual user content actually works, so unlikely a problem of user generated content violating TOS but Twitter pro-actively avoiding supporting the platform.

[bombcar]

This is the kind of thing that's interesting to document for a potential anti-trust case. Blocking the entire domain because it's "spammy" could be argued as fair - but only blocking the main links is more suspect.

[dpedu]

When I attempt this I get a modal message saying:

> We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.

Who are these partners, that apparently have the ability to block links on twitter?

Edit: attempting to save the tweet as a draft results in a different error: "The content of your Tweet is invalid."

[INTPenis]

There was an issue a couple months ago where mastodon.social was blacklisted by some AV vendor. I seem to remember Eugen posting about this.

I also believe some profile had been used as C&C, which could have caused the blacklist.

[shp0ngle]

they probably partner with some content filtering third parties for stuff like abuse blocking, child porn, copyright infringement, spam, you name it. I am wildly guessing that they outsource some of that stuff.

[debacle]

Twitter's "Trusted Partner Platform" includes government organizations (including those outside the US), fortune 500s, etc.

[dewey]

This is likely the same reason that sometimes links on FB can't be pasted. There's a spike in usage and some anti-spam mechanism blocks it. Which makes sense, but sometimes catches the wrong URL just like every spam filter.

Give it a day, move along.

[sequoia]

A lot of people here are jumping to conclusions based on what could simply be a bug. Why not wait 24hrs and see if this is actually some policy or just a mistake.

[anonymousab]

This was, is, a common refrain as Google slowly but surely ensured that Firefox users would run into blocking issues and mysterious performance bugs, every week, that disappear with merely a user agent change. Mighty convenient a supermajority of the time, these bugs.

At some point when your scale is big enough and you are the dominant incumbent, whether something is due to wreckless accidents or intentional or "blind"/ignorant malice is a moot question. The responsibility is (and so too should the punishments be) the same. That must be treated as the necessary cost of operating at this scale.

[gaius_baltar]

"It's a bug" is also a very convenient excuse for a lot of behaviors from the usual companies...

[mypalmike]

Yes. I tend to assume the people who are quick to think conspiracy and/or malice in these kinds of situations are either students or nontechnical users. If you've been working as a developer in the industry for a while, you've seen bugs like this many times.

[SnowHill9902]

It’s a feature until it goes viral then it’s a bug.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The logic of social media pileons is too pervasive at this point. As you can see upthread, a lot of people genuinely believe that they’re morally obligated to join these kind of pileons precisely because there’s not much information available; if we don’t apply pressure, there’ll never be a full investigation and they will get away with it! (And I very much include myself in "people" here, I've been there before many times.)

I think you just have to accept these days that when you go on an online platform you’ll see a few outrage mobs gathered around some tiny scrap of information. It’s like walking into a nightclub and asking people why they won’t drink more responsibly.

[can16358p]

They will of course say that it's a bug otherwise they're in potential great trouble.

But "why" that "bug" was there in the first place is another issue.

[alaricus]

Bug or malice, the end result is the same. I hope EU regulators pick on this and land a hefty fine.

[Kadin]

Because masquerading a controversial "feature" as a bug would be a good way to trial it, and see what the pushback from your users is like.

Twitter doesn't have enough credibility left to deserve the benefit of the doubt.

[bstar77]

Even if it isn't a bug, there's probably enough malicious stuff going on linked to these domains that it's justified. Even if the sites themselves are not producing malicious content, they are targeted by bad actors because the platform lacks the tech to detect and moderate said bad actors. And lets be honest, users of this platform are likely to be very susceptible to misinformation and manipulation.

[supernes]

"We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more."

Harmful to whom, Twitter?

[0daystock]

May I suggest nitter.net - an open source, javascript-free alternative front-end to twitter to help you wean off.

[danielcid]

They are also blocking noc.social (another mastodon instance). Wonder if more are impacted.

[djyaz1200]

How cool to be able to comment out a competitor ;)

[jmcnulty]

Maybe there was some content on mastodon.social they didn't like. As they don't integrate with ActivityPub they can't block individual users so perhaps they chose to block the whole domain instead.

It's not like they're cutting off the whole Fediverse. There are hundreds (thousands?) of mastadon instances and none of the others will be affected by this.

[danielcid]

They are also blocking noc.social (another mastodon instance). Wonder if more are impacted.

[jerojero]

Surely this won't be the case anymore under Elon, right? ... right?

On a serious note, do we know if there are other links that are blocked; like facebook or instagram or even onlyfans?

[ncrmro]

I’m also a bit miffed that all outbound links are converted to a link shorter which Pihole (or one of the lists I added) has blocked.

Can’t even copy the url to paste into browser

[rietta]

This most likely scenario is that over a decade ago, someone at Twitter copied a regex from Stack Overflow for URL validation and it has been there ever since.

[miduil]

Update: They've restored mastodon.social but https://noc.social is still blocked

[alaricus]

This is textbook anti-competitive behaviour. I hope the EU regulators jump on this and give a hefty fine to Twitter.

[tehlike]

You really should learn laws better before claiming textbook anti competitive.

[sillysaurusx]

Not surprising. Social networks have been known to block smaller competitors.

After all, it’s their right to as a private company. Isn’t that how that works? Everyone always says that, and this is a case of that.

[focusedone]

Sweet, that'll make it go away for sure.

[derekzhouzhen]

Linking to twitter is horrible too. Try this in your terminal:

> curl https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1532710931590959104

There is nothing of value in the static part of the html. For fuck's sake, there is no even title.