Twitter Marks Clean Sites As Harmful, Breaks Links

starglider29a writes "Yesterday, a website I maintain that has a Twitter presence encountered an 'unsafe' warning when clicking on the tweets. 'This link has been flagged as potentially harmful.' After scanning the site and its database, then checking with Google and third-party site scanners, I found no evidence of harm. At noon, The Atlantic posted an article which describes the same issue with the Philadelphia City Paper. 'Perhaps most frustrating of all is that Twitter has not been particularly responsive to the paper's plight.' If the warnings are incorrect, how does Twitter justify this libel?"

Comments

Re:Stupid bastards, serves them right.

[squiggleslash]

So, I guess you haven't used Twitter.

People "use" Link shortening services on Twitter for two reasons:

1. (The original) Because they only have 140 characters to use, and "Reply to fuzzyfuzzyfungus's ridiculous comment about shortening URLs here: https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4403123&op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=45299555" does not actually fit in 140 characters.

2. (The current) Because Twitter doesn't let you post direct links any more. If you type a URL into a Tweet, it'll shorten it for you. Which, annoyingly, often leaves you with chains of redirects if a tweet whose URL you're clicking on was posted using a legacy Twitter feed manager that shortens URLs before adding them.

There is no way to post links without Twitter changing them to t.co/ links underneath at this stage. It's not a matter of people hiding behind link shortening services. It's a forced "feature".