New FAQ40: No X/Twitter links

[BethL]

Dear community,

In consultation with Bhante Sujato, the forum management team and mods, we have updated the forum policy to ban links, quotes and screenshots from X/Twitter.

Sincerely,

Beth ~on behalf of mgmt. and mods

@faujidoc1

Q40. Can I add/create a thread or post which contains a hyperlink to X (formerly Twitter)?

A: No. This also applies to X/Twitter screenshots.

Moderators will immediately assign such posts to the mod queue for further review. At the least, the mods will request the author to remove the hyperlink or screenshot. These moderated posts will remain hidden until resolution.

Please help the moderators by flagging such posts so that they can advise the author appropriately.

[Malunkyaputta]

Hi. I applaud this but interested why.

[WayChuang]

Whatever the reason is, I think banning a platform owned by someone who did a Nazi salute is good.

[Snowbird]

@Malunkyaputta

Hi. I applaud this but interested why.

See

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/t/hey-should-we-ban-twitter-x/37744

[Snowbird]

Have you considered what to do with links that go to alternative front ends like Nitter and xcancel.com?

I was about to share a link but then I realized that it was to one of these alternative front ends (xcancel). It doesn’t appear that one can get from one of these sites back to X/Twitter.

This is from xcancel’s About page:

The FAQ doesn’t state the reason why the ban is in place, so it’s hard to tell how these types of links should be treated.

@moderators & @management ?

[Adutiya]

That’s beyond my understanding of what all of that is.

[Khemarato.bhikkhu]

I could see it either way. Is the purpose of the ban to deprive Twitter of our traffic? Or is the point that information from Twitter can no longer be trusted?

Since the FAQ specifically calls out screenshots as forbidden, I think it’s more the latter than the former. So I think @Snowbird, you can consider mirror sites forbidden as well.

[Snowbird]

I’d like to hear from the folks who made the policy.

@Adutiya

That’s beyond my understanding of what all of that is.

So the way lots of dynamically created websites work (meaning the content is constantly changing) is to have some work done on a server somewhere (backend) and some work done on the end user’s device in the browser (frontend).

The communication between the two is through a type of software called an API.

From what I can tell, sites like Nitter create a backend that uses the Twitter API to get the content, and then the end user who is using Nitter, uses an API to get that scraped content from Nitter’s backend.

So when you link to Nitter, it is not linking to Twitter and you can’t get to twitter from there. You are never on Twitter and Twitter never touches your device.

Bhante Sujato would understand if the mods/management committee don’t. Like I said, there is no reason given for the policy so I’m not able to figure out if it extends to this.