
Twitter’s deletion of its FB app caused old cross-posts to temporarily disappear - prostoalex
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/28/facebook-has-removed-all-cross-posted-tweets/
======
PaulMest
Facebook did not purposely remove the cross-posted tweets. Twitter removed
their app from the Facebook platform which had this as an unfortunate result.

Source: [https://www.axios.com/how-cross-posted-tweets-disappeared-
fr...](https://www.axios.com/how-cross-posted-tweets-disappeared-from-
facebook-e65fd350-1898-4bc5-af0f-81e9614f5ec1.html)

~~~
msravi
> Twitter removed their app from the Facebook platform which had this as an
> unfortunate result.

> TechCrunch also heard from a source with understanding of the situation that
> the deletion of the app took Facebook by surprise, as well as the fact that
> Twitter didn’t immediately tell them to restore the content

These statements seem to indicate that Twitter was to blame for removing their
app. However, from the axios link:

> ...the Twitter app for the Facebook platform was essentially made useless
> earlier this month once Facebook officially removed the ability to cross-
> post.

> With the app's sole function eliminated, Twitter decided to delete it from
> the Facebook platform, having no reason to think that doing so would remove
> old tweets that were cross-posted.

> It's not clear whether Facebook knew this would happen, either.

Looks like Facebook did not know that Twitter would delete their app, and
Twitter did not know that deleting the app would delete the content. I can
understand why Facebook would have such a policy for deleted apps, and I can
understand why Twitter doesn't want to have a "dead" app that's active on the
Facebook platform. They probably just ought to have spoken to each other.

~~~
B-Con
> They probably just ought to have spoken to each other.

Twitter probably should have just done the dive to verify what deleting an app
does. I would guess this is mentioned somewhere in the docs.

~~~
msravi
Ok. So I spent a while on
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/)
and in particular on
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/)
trying to find documentation on deleting your app. Wasn't very successful, and
the search-box on the site wasn't very helpful either. In fact, the most
useful documentation I could find on deleting a facebook app as a developer
was on stackoverflow ([https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9962072/how-can-i-
delete...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9962072/how-can-i-delete-a-
facebook-app-that-i-developed)).

Perhaps someone who is a facebook app developer can chip in to say if this
info is in their docs somewhere...

~~~
Jare
I stopped developing Facebook apps a few years ago, but when we wound down our
games, we did not delete the apps fearing precisely this problem, or related
future problems like app name impersonation, squatting, etc. It just seemed
too easy to imagine scenarios where deleting the apps could cause trouble, and
the docs were useless for this.

We simply turned the apps off (don't remember exact wording). Last I checked
my dev email, I was still getting emails from Facebook warning of API changes
and informing of our games' metrics and activity (!), so it is true that
deleting an app is cleaner.

------
Alex3917
This is pretty crazy. For people whose job is social media, this is basically
the equivalent of Github just arbitrarily deciding they're going to delete all
of your startup's source code without telling anyone in advance, or like
Google Docs just deciding to disappear all your spreadsheets.

With only a couple months until election season, Facebook is now literally
editing politician's pages and deleting the campaign material they've created
to communicate with the voters in their districts.

~~~
MBCook
No, it’s the equivalent of GitHub deciding to remove all the code that you
automatically re-post from SourceForge.

In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK?

It meant people could be “on” Facebook and “active” without ever actually
logging in or using the app or engaging in any way.

Why would they want to just be a dumping ground for copies of another social
network’s posts?

I guess I’m surprised this was allowed in the first place, or at least not
removed many years ago.

~~~
shawn
It's the other way around. Why does Facebook think it has the right to remove
years of their users' contributions?

As the years march on, I think we'll see more and more data protection laws in
favor of users rather than companies. Data is the new uranium, not the new
oil. It needs to be protected and taken seriously.

You can argue that it's Facebook's site and that they can do whatever they
want. I argue that they cause material harm to users by removing years worth
of social interactions among their family and friends. Emotional harm is still
harm, and it should be treated as such.

In other words, it's a shame that they didn't catch this use case sooner, but
that's really not the users' problem. The fact is, users were doing this. And
now that they've been doing this, it's unethical to wipe all of their
conversations just because you feel you can.

The largest companies are mostly monopolies. When there's nowhere else to go
to have a conversation with the people you care about, what are you supposed
to do when companies suddenly tell you that your conversations are violating
their terms of service?

~~~
Bucephalus355
This:

“Data is the new uranium, not the new oil”.

Looks like Facebook is sitting on the largest legal liability of the 21st
century.

It’s kind of like being a major manufacturer in the US in 1970...you’re about
to get screwed by 40+ years of environmental law (considering the river in
Cleveland caught in fire in 1969, one can see why some of these laws were
passed).

~~~
pdelbarba
*caught fire 13 times

(river is the Cuyahoga)

~~~
Xylakant
The Great Lakes Brewing Company has a Burning River Pale Ale as a toast to
that. [https://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/burning-
river](https://www.greatlakesbrewing.com/burning-river)

------
AdamTReineke
Holy shit... Literally ten years of Facebook posts and people's comments on
them just up and disappeared from my profile. How is that ok?

~~~
mb_72
Hopefully it's just a 'soft' delete, and this can be undone. I can't imagine
FB actually hard-deleting any information that might help them in terms of ads
etc.

~~~
hvidgaard
It's 99.9999% not a hard delete. They have fail overs and multiple backups.

~~~
yoz-y
Especially since it is practically impossible to delete anything there
intentionally.

------
tylerhou
Hanlon's razor, anybody?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor).
This could just be a mistake.

~~~
artursapek
Doubtful such a big change made it through Facebook's tight release process by
mistake.

~~~
dymk
How familiar are you with Facebook's release process?

------
munchbunny
Based on the article, the intended behavior was to disallow third parties to
post as the user, _going forward._ But what actually happened was that
historic third party app posts also got hidden/deleted?

I feel like that's a pretty obvious problem you would anticipate and write
tests for, isn't it? How did something like this manage to get to public
rollout?

~~~
not_kurt_godel
Facebook, unlike many services, has the luxury of not having to worry about
backwards-incompatible changes and data migration when it comes to their user-
facing experience since that's not where their money comes from. I doubt this
problem was intentional, and is probably being fixed, but seems characteristic
of an engineering culture that can afford to be apathetic towards such
concerns, if not downright contemptuous (i.e. A/B testing user
psychological/emotional state thru content manipulation).

------
mabbo
The problem here is the dichotomy of "ownership" in social media platforms.

Facebook (and others) know that giving you that feeling of ownership and
customization keeps you coming back. The Twitter Avatar, the Facebook profile,
the MySpace page. All those posts on your profile add to your collection, your
customization. They let you control that little bit so that you feel like you
own it in some way. Did you love that old car so much that you put a bumper
sticker on it, or did putting a bumper sticker on it make it more "yours" and
so you loved it more? Same idea.

But you don't own it. Nothing you post on those platforms belongs to you
anymore. It's theirs, to do with as they wish. And in this case, Facebook
decided that retroactively deleting all that content that lets you be aware of
other platforms was good for their bottom line- do they did what they wanted
with _their_ property.

Facebook deleted their posts. You only thought they were yours because
Facebook makes more money if you think that.

~~~
monetus
What do you think about the idea of classifying social media as a utility?
I've heard a lot of people mention that lately...

~~~
um_ya
Then people will have to come to terms that banning Alex Jones was a bad idea
too. You can't support a companies right to ban people you don't like while
simultaneously advocating protections as a utility.

~~~
monetus
Yes, universal access to the utility makes sense. But what would the utility
be? Could FB possibly be nationalized? It's international at its core. If
governments created a copycat, it could fragment social media by country,
which seems bad. I like the protective intent, but barely have an idea of how
it might be implemented.

~~~
StudentStuff
Centralized social media isn't long for this world IMO, look at what is
happening to Twitter (userbase erosion) & Reddit (people are flooding there
from Facebook, hurting site quality). Meanwhile notable figures have moved on
from both sites, in part due to bans or purely due to the degradation of their
former social home.

------
chasing
Huh. Weird to retroactively pull content out of my feed. Now there's just,
like, one post from all of 2018. Reveals to both me and the world that I don't
actually really use Facebook that much... :-/

~~~
jillesvangurp
Yes from what I can see in my feed, Facebook is rapidly imploding. A lot of my
friends, family, etc. have stopped engaging with it completely. Younger people
are simply not on it at all. Long time active posters have gone silent one by
one. As a consequence my feed is now completely dominated by just a handful of
people that are still actively using it for whatever reason. It's less
relevant to me now than at any point in the 11 or so years I've been on it.

------
shawn
Make your own website and you won’t have to worry about this.

I’m mostly joking. Who makes their own websites anymore?

Frustrating seeing users caught in the crossfire of policy updates for tech
giants.

~~~
ravenstine
Or just go back to email, which is what I've done. Proton Mail is an excellent
alternative to Gmail, and pretty much everyone, even Richard Stallman, has an
email address. Reaching out to individuals or sending out a general update
every once in a while will suffice. Unless one's friends are really immature,
people will hesitate to send you photos of their food or their thoughts on
some trite opinion piece.

~~~
bduerst
What's wrong with GMail?

Google stopped mining it last year:
[https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-
in...](https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-
enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/)

~~~
vageli
> What's wrong with GMail?

> Google stopped mining it last year:
> [https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-
> in...](https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in..).

Google stopped mining it for ads, but it's disingenuous to say they stopped
mining, period [0]. How do you think those Gmail suggested replies are
generated?

[0]: [https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-
email...](https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-
emails-1202477321)

~~~
bduerst
> Smart Reply uses neural networks to figure out the main intent of an email,
> and then suggest short and adequate responses. It’s an incredibly useful
> feature, it works surprisingly well — and it clearly requires for Google’s
> computers to “read” your email.

Would you stop using Protonmail if they offered the same feature?

~~~
ravenstine
I'm not sure who you are addressing, but I would stop using ProtonMail if they
did. Then again, I've never found Google's response suggestions to be useful.

------
throwaway76524
This is exactly what the media corporations want. This is not an oversight.
Facebook, Comcast, Disney, Google, etc will control information and as a
result the general public's thoughts in due time.

------
tristanho
Pretty annoying. This is following them completely banning any "posting" on
behalf of users via API. (e.g the feature to cross-post tweets)

While this change was definitely made in the interest of preventing spam, it
also made Facebook worse as a product. We've had plenty of requests from our
users who want a "share an image of my book passage to FB" feature. Not
possible at all with their new stricter APIs.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
It's only worse as a product if it hurts advertisers. The user isn't the
customer.

~~~
wolco
The user is the product. It removes another content source for the user
causing some products to leave the platform because it becomes less useful.

Facebook was the most useful pre 2012. You could create widgets that changed
the look of part of your profile. Facebook games were interactive and not
siloed like they are now. People posted status updates and they appeared in
the news feeds of others.

------
paxy
I really hope this isn't intentional. Deleting a ton of user data from their
site on a whim is pretty ridiculous.

~~~
CoughlinJ
They definitely would not delete any data. Just remove any display or access
to it.

------
CookieMon
They could remove the Share content instead, so feeds empty down into what
friends and family are doing instead of whatever Fwd:Fwd:Fwd: manages to press
the most viral buttons.

/one can dream

------
erikpukinskis
I don’t know what people are complaining about. You should’ve known when you
signed up for America Online that it wasn’t the “full internet”. If you want
that you should buy dialup from a real ISP.

~~~
ubernostrum
AOL was an actual ISP. They just _also_ had a walled-garden thing they pushed
you to stay in. But you could go visit whatever sites you wanted in a regular
web browser, you could do FTP and mail and stuff.

------
galaxyLogic
I'm not sure I understand how this would help Facebook. Isn't it better for
them the more content they have? More content more readers more advertising
revenue.

On the other hand there has been a lot of concerns of illegitimate accounts
spreading propaganda, affecting US elections, and it may be harder for
Facebook to validate accounts that basically only exist on Twitter.

~~~
elliotec
It seems unclear if this was actually on purpose for what it's worth, but I
wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt by any means.

------
f_allwein
> Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking
> into it.

Sounds like it may be a bug?

------
sporkologist
FTA:

"In theory, the API changes should only have prevented Twitter users from
continuing to cross-post their tweets to Facebook automatically. It shouldn’t
have also deleted the existing posts from Facebook users’ profiles and
business users’ Facebook Pages."

oops

------
have_faith
I honestly didn't think anyone cared about historical posts on any of the
platforms, I'd be happy if they just auto-deleted after 30 days.

Also, cross-posts from 3rd parties make up the majority of crap on my
timeline. Happy to se it go and happy to see people being exposed to the
fragility of relying on these free services as a backup service for anything
they consider important. I hope it prompts people to consider their
relationship with these types of platforms and what is being exchanged between
you and them exactly.

~~~
pdpi
Nothing about this comes from services being paid or not. Paid services
blocking (or being blocked by) third parties can and does happen.

------
newfocogi
It might just take a few more decisions like this from the social media
incumbants before alternative social media structures (federated or
distributed) actually make sense for the masses...

~~~
dexterdog
They already make plenty of sense but people aren't moving because nobody else
already has. It's chicken and egg.

~~~
elliotec
Are we talking about Mastodon? Can you provide any more information to what
you two are talking about?

------
th0ma5
The other direction seems unaffected from my own cursory look around. I.e.
Facebook posts still can become Tweets seemingly, although that may be from
these people's third party tools.

------
ddingus
That is going to improve the trust!

/s

People will notice things just being different. Good object lesson, and I hope
robust discussion.

------
Apocryphon
I'm no longer to cross-Tweet to Facebook anymore, but my old Tweets still
appear. I added the Twitter integration back in 2009-10- maybe it's from a
version of the API too old to be removed.

------
rfeather
Given that this consequence seems to be unintended, it seems surprising that
two companies this large couldn't/didn't find a way to test the effect ahead
of time.

------
SN76477
Facebook squeeze too tight. They always have, this is nothing new.

------
noahlt
Empirically, this seems not to have happened with my account.

------
pmlnr
Does FB still allow instagram cross-posts?

If yes, why is nobody sueing?

------
icc97
All the more reason to post your thoughts to your own blog and then push those
to Twitter and Facebook, then the core data is your own.

------
enobrev
Always test migrations before running in production!

Either this has been fixed, or my account hat not yet been affected.

------
anonytrary
I'm sick of hearing about Facebook all the time and I'm sick of seeing the
same old recycled opinions of why people dislike or like Facebook every time
Facebook sneezes. Facebook is not that interesting, and it's barely even
academically interesting. It's a half-trillion dollar joke, laugh while it's
still funny.

------
cwyers
Tweets cross-posted to Facebook was always a horrible user experience. I could
never understand why anyone did it. But this hamfisted way of fixing the
problem is just awful.

------
spr1ted
Well.. both companies will go down the sink as they have been heavily involded
in rigging the election. Defaming trump. Disinformation.

------
i386
Very strange product thinking at Facebook if they decided removing this
feature was going to delete their data.

------
serhadiletir
those actions for user benefits?

------
saudioger
they put them back

------
Memosyne
These types of tweets always appear spammy and disingenuous so I can
understand why they'd want to remove them.

~~~
greglindahl
I have friends who are FB employees and make almost all of their postings via
tweets.

And then there's often FB-based discussion about them.

------
pwaai
It seems like Twitter is in serious trouble and Facebook is going for the
kill. Hootsuite, a Vancouver micro-unicorn, a word I just coined right here
and right now. Micro-unicorns are almost billion dollar companies specifically
for selling to FANG. built upon Twitter, social media platforms, has recently
been seen in the local news (, seems to be in trouble as well.

~~~
ponyfleisch
> micro-unicorn

Microcorn!

~~~
draven
µnicorn

~~~
mmel
Dank.

