
Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages - f_allwein
https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/link-twitter-to-facebook
======
AndrewDucker
To be clear, Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post _anything_
to a personal profile.

More details: [https://betanews.com/2018/08/02/twitter-facebook-
crossposts-...](https://betanews.com/2018/08/02/twitter-facebook-crossposts-
stop/)

~~~
jpatokal
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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Good! This means more open distribution methods (email) will be given priority
again.

I don't want Facebook, nor Twitter. Just take my email address and send me
your content, or offer an RSS feed.

EDIT: Anyone know if this kills Buffer and other social feed managers?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Good - if you don't like/use Facebook. For people who like/use it (and there
are many), this is a very sad day.

~~~
toomuchtodo
What the walled garden giveth, it taketh away. Build on someone's platform?
Depend on it exclusively? Gonna have a bad time. You would think folks would
learn by now.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
The real problem is that if 80% of your audience is in the walled garden, and
no more than 10% of your audience is on any one of the many other
alternatives, you're kind of stuck if you want to reach as many of them as
possible easily.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It’s not your audience; it’s Facebook’s audience. You’ve just been granted the
temporary privilege of access to them with no further guarantees.

------
joekrill
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 difficult for the bots). But maybe I'm
wrong. I don't really use Facebook to begin with so I'm probably missing
something here.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
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, but it's certainly more difficult
to implement than it is on Facebook).

You'd think the posters in this thread have some kind of business interest in
this functionality based on the way they're reacting.

~~~
megaman22
> 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, but it's certainly more
> difficult to implement than it is on Facebook).

We are clearly not looking at the same subset of Instagram. I don't know
anybody that actually uses it to post real content; it's just an endless feed
of meme shitposting to laugh at.

~~~
bonniemuffin
Is this you?
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/the-i...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/the-
instagram-forums-where-teens-go-to-debate-big-issues/566153/)

~~~
lapnitnelav
Hey that was a pretty cool read.

Interesting to see what the kids are up to.

------
Vivtek
So basically this removes _my_ ability to set up crossposting through a nicely
maintainable API, without making it much more difficult for any bot
organization with an IT staff on call to switch to something like Selenium for
their propaganda posting?

------
chasing
People who follow me on Facebook are different than people who follow me on
Twitter. The integration was nice because I could send messages to both
platforms at once and would get responses from different people on each.

I'm not going to copy-paste every tweet into Facebook, so I suspect I'll
basically go silent on that platform. Which sucks. And if I'm not an active
part of the Facebook community, I'll probably visit facebook.com very rarely.

~~~
mkirklions
I switched from Facebook to Twitter/Snap/Insta.

Much easier than I expected, I still check my facebook once every few weeks,
but the content on FB was garbage.

~~~
iamdave
Here here, re: content.

My usage of Facebook would probably increase if there was a way to filter-on
site-keywords in and out of my newsfeed instead of relying on a browser
extension.

As it is, I'm constantly hiding posts, snoozing or unfollowing people
altogether-thinking "Fine Facebook, if you want to use algorithms based on how
I use the site to customize my newsfeed, customize _this_ ".

Seems the site hasn't yet picked up that I don't want everyone's
oversimplified political hot takes (but I like one Nicholas Cage meme and
suddenly FB reacts "Would you like ALL the Cage recommendations??" No, not
really). I like checking in on my friends, and that's the extant of how useful
FB is to me, but there's a real fatigue to the political fatalism front and
center.

So, twitter it is. So I can get my oversimplified _sports_ hot takes. Those
are at least humorous and entertaining.

If a social network comes along and grants me that kind of control, I would
gladly beta that.

------
TheRealWatson
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 exactly a noiseless feed but I sort of have
to put up with it given family and friends.

~~~
Jare
> 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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
TeMPOraL
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.

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

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

------
badsavage
This was the only way I used facebook. Time to move on

~~~
cyxxon
I didn't know that was possible, so I used to do the same thing via IFTTT,
that probably still works.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Nope. All automated posting to a personal profile is now blocked.

~~~
SpecialistEMT
Ifttt to fan page should work

------
tomrod
On related note, Python's mechanize and requests libraries will probably soar
in popularity.

~~~
tudorconstantin
I haven't tried to, but I think you'll need a software that can interpret js
to interact with FB. Like webdriver, or headless chrome.

~~~
lukax
You could use [https://mbasic.facebook.com/](https://mbasic.facebook.com/)
which doesn't use any JavaScript (there is actually no script tags in the page
source).

~~~
TeMPOraL
I wonder how soon they'll try to plug that hole with something like requiring
2FA for each login.

~~~
mantas
It's not hard to automate 2FA. Especially if it supports offline google-style
2FA. But SMS are doable too.

------
partiallypro
So, does this not apply to Pages? Only personal profiles? If it applies to
pages too, it's going to break thousands upon thousands of post automations
for publications.

------
wjp3
Seems that everyday brings news that justifies me leaving FB.

------
pbhjpbhj
I exclusively use FB, so I had automated posting of tweets (from my kids
schools) to FB so I could stay in the loop.

Also at work we Tweeted Facebook activity.

I'll have to use Twitter now instead of just using Facebook. Is the hope from
Facebook that people will just not bother with Twitter?

Why haven't Facebook notified us wrt business use that Tweets will no longer
be pulled in?

------
tokyodude
Thank you. I wish I was considered common courtesy to not cross post. If I'm
following you on more than one service then everytime I see your double or
triple post you've effectively wasted my time.

Heck, I wish it was more common to consider if what you're posting is really
worth interrupting all of your followers.

------
f_allwein
Yes, it's not the original title, but "How to use Twitter with Facebook" does
not sum up well what changed.

~~~
nmeofthestate
The title is somewhat contradictory: "FB ends the ability to auto-post tweets
to your profile" on an article about how to auto-post tweets to your FB
profile.

~~~
Ensorceled
The first section on the page is that this feature is going away. It was
pretty self evident upon clicking the link.

------
emeraldd
Does this change impact the ability to programatically create ads? I seem to
remember the Facebook API treating ads as a kind of shadow post on a page the
last time I messed with it. If that is still the case, this could also force
users into the Facebook UI for that functionality.

------
rvense
Facebook must be destroyed.

~~~
bookofjoe
21st-century Carthage

------
waydowntogo
It looks like MySpace v2.0

------
ec109685
This going to encourage dark patterns like asking for Facebook username and
password for apps that want to support automation.

------
djhaskin987
For those who miss the functionality, you can use IFTTT for this:
[https://ifttt.com/search/query/facebook](https://ifttt.com/search/query/facebook)

I use it to post pictures to twitter whenever I post to instagram, but there's
a lot of nice facebook <-> twitter functionality too.

~~~
grkvlt
I don't think so, _ALL_ automated posting is blocked now ;(

------
reustle
I'm guessing they'll still allow automatic posting from Instagram

~~~
ceejayoz
Sure, why not? They have full visibility and control over both sides of that
transaction in a way they don't with other integrations.

Same reason Apple can use private APIs but no one else can.

------
dkitchen
I assume IFTTT would continue to be a good solution, no?

~~~
Vivtek
Nope, this breaks their automation as well. Facebook has basically removed
posting ability to personal feeds from their API entirely.

------
nunez
My page is about to get a whole lot quieter now lol

------
glitchc
Sounds like circling of the wagons to me, to reduce or prevent Facebook users
from leaving the domain.

------
miguelrochefort
First Alex Jones. The this.

Way to go Facebook! /s

~~~
rge4seesr
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
What? Having social iteraction owned by a private quasi-monopoly means the
monopoly can screw with how you interact with the world at will? Who could
have guessed that?

Really, I don't understand how this is news. It's what was going to happen,
everyone with half a brain has known that since facebook started being a
thing, and anyone who cared could trivially avoid it. So how is it that there
are still people who apparently care that this happens?

~~~
fakeempire
> Really, I don't understand how this is news. It's what was going to happen,
> everyone with half a brain has known that since facebook started being a
> thing

Just because something isn't a surprise to you, doesn't mean its not news. I
know that wild fires will inevitably happen, but I'm happy that they are
reported on the news.

> So how is it that there are still people who apparently care that this
> happens?

So how is it that there are still people who apparently don't realize that the
2B+ users of facebook don't know everything they know.

