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Facebook changes means that it appears that the share card on Facebook no longer builds share cards based on the canonical meta-data field.
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Clearly this is related to Facebook API changes at developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2017/06/27/API-Change-Log-Modifying-Link-Previews/
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Hmmm, maybe not, investigating further
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The problem is occurring, but inconsistently. Odd.
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Oh great, just noticed another change to Facebook's parsing of metadata for share-cards. No more bylines unless you have a FB URL attached.
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See: nytimes.com/2017/06/30/us/mika-brzezinski-trump-tweets.html (No visible byline on the share card) vs nytimes.com/2017/06/13/technology/uber-travis-kalanick-holder-report.html?_r=0 (Byline visible)
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That's pretty awful. It means Facebook no longer respects authorship without a public Facebook page for the author.
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Means Facebook will only show bylines of people willing to run a page, be spammed, abused, and non-anonymous.
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This is basically Facebook imposing it's real name policy on the entire web. And we all know the multitude of problems that policy has.
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This also means that Facebook is moving away from supporting the rel=author field, which most other social platforms have supported.
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Not great. I was hoping that we'd see authorship and People schemas create a better and more trusted web via bylines medium.com/@aramzs/authorship-value-and-the-medias-lost-profits-dabe7d1726c8
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Note in the 1st example, where no byline is included on the Facebook share, the Schema and OG setup for authorship is flawless, just not FB
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So once again we're moving away from reliably showing bylines in a standard way across multiple platforms. Bad news for journalism.
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No doubt Facebook would claim this move is part of effort to eliminate fake news. Bullshit. Fake news can create author pages like anyone.
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This fast a change, seems likely the change in behavior was a bug, not a feature, of the changes to the API for share cards.