Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/link-twitter-to-facebook

by f_allwein • 8 years ago

179 114 8 years ago

help.twitter.com

f_allwein• 8 years ago

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

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• 8 years ago

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

badsavage• 8 years ago

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

cyxxon• 8 years ago

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

AndrewDucker4• 8 years ago

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

AndrewDucker4• 8 years ago

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-...

jpatokal• 8 years ago

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.

AndrewDucker4• 8 years ago

Yup. I had DlvrIt posting my blog posts to Facebook, and now that doesn't work.

toomuchtodo3• 8 years ago

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?

gm-conspiracy3• 8 years ago

Yes, this was part of their "security" change after the Cambridge Analytica debacle.

Although, any site using their JS API can still get your name, email and a unique ID, posting is now restricted via a FB modal or pop-up (which is blocked by more recent browsers).

I think this happened in May/June of this year, IIRC.

dao-• 8 years ago

Except for Instagram posts, presumably?

AndrewDucker4• 8 years ago

Yup, Instagram still works.

mrweasel• 8 years ago

I wonder what the reasoning behind this is. It seems that it would reduce the amount of content on Facebook.

Perhaps the thought is that people will go and post directly to Facebook instead? Or it could be a way of reducing noice/spam.

ghaff2• 8 years ago

Apparently it's part of further locking down their API (https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/01/psa-cross-posting-tweets-t...) so that random apps that have been given permission to post by default can no longer do so.

The way I read it, people who deliberately want to cross-post tweets are essentially collateral damage.

tomrod• 8 years ago

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

tudorconstantin• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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

Finnucane• 8 years ago

the selenium-requests package offers a nice integration of this.

reustle• 8 years ago

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

ceejayoz2• 8 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj• 8 years ago

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?

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

wjp3• 8 years ago

Seems that everyday brings news that justifies me leaving FB.

waydowntogo• 8 years ago

It looks like MySpace v2.0

joekrill• 8 years ago

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.

grey-area• 8 years ago

It's more likely a move to try to keep people within the walled garden of facebook - people can't easily move to competitors (like blogs, other social media), if those competitors can't share to facebook too automatically to ease the transition.

It also means they can more easily charge companies for posting (who are the ones most likely to want to post to several services).

SmellyGeekBoy2• 8 years ago

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.

megaman222• 8 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL12• 8 years ago

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.

Sure, but that doesn't mean you want it always entered on Facebook. When I post an Instagram photo, I'd like it to show up on Facebook as well (ironically, and totally as expected, this one will apparently still work). When I write a review on Goodreads, I'd like it to be reposted on Facebook automatically, without me having to copy-paste it. Etc.

This move is just further walling up Facebook's ecosystem.

wolco• 8 years ago

Like automatic twitter updates containing personal thoughts being rebroadcasted. This will reduce the already thinning content on facebook further.

sethhochberg• 8 years ago

I don't really get the hate, either - but then again, I was one of the people who was generally annoyed by friends filling their profiles and feeds with all kinds of auto-shared stuff from every other service... I like to imagine everybody would curate a little bit more on their own. Important stuff will still get shared, and if it isn't worth sharing if you have to do it manually instead of using an app or checkbox to "always share to Facebook", well, maybe it wasn't worth sharing to the world in the first place.

(I think in reality, my view of Facebook as a tool for messaging and looking at photos is probably fundamentally different than a lot of the upset people posting here who seemed to use Facebook for promoting their blogs or personal twitter brand or whatever)

bena5• 8 years ago

You may have different followers on each platform. Your Instagram followers and your twitter followers and your Facebook friends are all slightly different groups. So to reach all of them, you need to post to all of these platforms.

daveFNbuck3• 8 years ago

I used to use this feature. It meant that I didn't have to log in to Facebook to re-post the thing I already posted on Twitter. If I still used this feature, I'd be upset that Facebook just took a step to make my life a little bit harder.

In general, I care more about my own convenience than some incremental step against bots that probably won't noticeably impact my experience on the site.

donalhunt• 8 years ago

I agree - I see a lot of small business, even individuals from music/art circles what don't want to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping "followers" up to date...

If they can create and share once but have the computers syndicate that to the places that matter, they've found a happy balance.

The issue with the current model is that it's easily abused by bad actors (pun intended) to cram content down people's eye sockets.

athenot• 8 years ago

I'm in the same boat. It would apprear they realized that they are loosing advertizing eyeballs. Just checked, this also affects Buffer¹.

Well, if they are making a push to lock people into their platform, this might make me back off further.

¹https://faq.buffer.com/article/985-publish-facebook-profiles

mindcrime3• 8 years ago

I'm not outraged, but I think it's a self-defeating move for Facebook. Which is fine, since Facebook - as a walled garden which is opposed to the Open Web - needs to go away anyway.

Edit:

I'm thinking more and more that I will probably be deleting my Facebook account sometime in the not too distant future. I'd really rather be doing all of my information sharing / browsing / interaction using a pure Open Web[1] oriented platform and that's exactly what Facebook is not.

Not sure exactly what form this will take, but I want to move to a platform which is not a walled garden, and is based on open and decentralized standards like RSS/Atom, ActivityStrea.ms, ActivityPub, RDF, FOAF, SIOC, XMPP, NNTP, SMTP, and the like.

A proper Web platform should allow anyone to participate on their own terms without some corporation being able to arbitrarily decide the terms of what you can do, while simultaneously profiting from the resale of our personal data.

Maybe this will mean Mastodon, maybe I'll go back to a self-hosted Roller based blog, etc. I already self-host an ejabberd server for XMPP messaging, so that will probably be part of what I do going forward.

[1] http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web

rconti• 8 years ago

I feel like everyone uses different platforms to different ends, so I'm surprised at the number of people who feel the desire to crosspost.

To me, twitter is utterly cancerous and Facebook is where I see friends and family. To others, they use Twitter for communication with their business network, and Facebook for friends. And so on. The idea of blasting from one to the other, other than in the case of businesses (which I'm not much concerned about, they can suck it up) seems odd.

Obviously there's the occasional "tell twitter AND facebook that, after 10 years involved with this organization, I will be moving on.." but those rare cross posts can be done manually. It's the always-posting-multiple-places-as-part-of-a-personal-account that perplexes me.

TeMPOraL12• 8 years ago

And yet for some reason, plenty of people do mix and match. I have a bunch of Facebook friends who used the Twitter -> FB transport; part of their network is on Twitter, the other part is on Facebook, and they want to use a single entry point that's more convenient for them when posting.

The outrage isn't just about Twitter though. It's also about that you now can't do IFTTT->Facebook, Buffer->Facebook, or whatever other app you were using (including your own)->Facebook.

(Speaking of Buffer, did this move just kill their business?)

ConceptJunkie3• 8 years ago

Perhaps, but anything that can no longer be done with a bot can (and will) be done by hordes of Chinese or Indian, etc., people working for pennies an hour.

eugeniub• 8 years ago

Unless FaceBook is going to introduce CAPTCHAs for all submissions, bots will still be able to post just fine with a few tweaks.

grkvlt2• 8 years ago

It's annoying, I use Twitter as my main social network outlet, and post there regularly, and it was always convenient to have the posts mirrored on Facebook, since many friends don't use Twitter. Twitter is more of a work related thing, I guess, so perhaps I'll just end up segmenting my posting into work/personal between the two sites, but there's plenty of overlap and things I want to automatically go both places...

TheRealWatson• 8 years ago

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.

ghaff2• 8 years ago

I mostly agree. I use different social media for mostly different purposes and I'm not a huge fan of indiscriminately spewing every thought and post across every connected network. I cross-post some things when I think it makes sense to do so but it's a small percentage of the total.

Jare• 8 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL12• 8 years ago

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.

amerkhalid• 8 years ago

I had my blog auto post to facebook when I was using WordPress it was convenient but quickly realized it was annoying for others. Now I manually share on personal profile if I think my friends would enjoy it.

Glad to see it go away. Personally, I was getting tired of others’ auto posts too.

TeMPOraL12• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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

TeMPOraL12• 8 years ago

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

mindcrime3• 8 years ago

And a reminder of how life with SaaS platforms looks like. You have little ability to improve things for yourself.

Exactly. Hopefully this will nudge more people to start running smaller, more regionalized (maybe down to the level of the individual) instances of Open Source platforms, based on Open Standards, to replace the kind of functionality people have been getting from the Facebooks and Twitters and Instagrams of the world. That would be a Good Thing.

miguelrochefort• 8 years ago

First Alex Jones. The this.

Way to go Facebook! /s

rge4seesr• 8 years ago

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.

TeMPOraL12• 8 years ago

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.

nunez• 8 years ago

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

chasing• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

genericid4• 8 years ago

I switched from Facebook to [...] Insta.

Well done! That will show them.

dkitchen• 8 years ago

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

Vivtek2• 8 years ago

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

Vivtek2• 8 years ago

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?

glitchc• 8 years ago

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

partiallypro• 8 years ago

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.

djhaskin987• 8 years ago

For those who miss the functionality, you can use IFTTT for this: 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.

grkvlt2• 8 years ago

I don't think so, ALL automated posting is blocked now ;(

tokyodude• 8 years ago

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.

emeraldd• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

Facebook must be destroyed.

bookofjoe• 8 years ago

21st-century Carthage

ec109685• 8 years ago

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

Facebook has ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to profiles or pages

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