Chronotope’s avatarChronotope’s Twitter Archive—№ 85,762

    1. Facebook appears to have, with no notice, entirely pulled bylines out of share cards.
  1. …in reply to @Chronotope
    I've been watching this for a while and it doesn't seem like a one off thing or temporary error.
    1. …in reply to @Chronotope
      I wasn't well inclined towards Facebook's claims they were trying to do something about "fake news" before, but now I'm even less inclined. Any claim that Facebook makes about trying to combat content fraud is bullshit as long as bylines aren't on share cards.
      1. …in reply to @Chronotope
        Knowing the authors of content on your feed is as essential a part of media literacy as the source publication. Especially in the world Facebook has built which hinges trust on personal connections.
        1. …in reply to @Chronotope
          Notably, the linked bylines, which would send you to author pages seem to have disappeared, but their occurrence was so intermittent it is hard to tell.
          1. …in reply to @Chronotope
            There are only two conceivable reasons I can imagine Facebook doing this: They believe that the only meaningful trust signal is who shares a piece. They are actively opposing news media positioning as a trusted source.
            1. …in reply to @Chronotope
              Let's put 2 to one side. If 1 is true it is ludicrously, patently stupid, but exactly the type of position they would take. And it means they really don't give a crap about fixing their "fake news" problem.
              1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                By removing bylines, Facebook makes itself a collaborator with those who seek to misinform Americans and citizens everywhere.
                1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                  Some additional double checking: the Facebook provided Open Graph debugging tool no longer recognizes the "article:author" Open Graph metadata node, which is where Facebook previously advised publications to place links to author FB pages.
                  1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                    Nor does the Open Graph debugger recognize the meta name="author" node, which previously populated bylines not in the Open Graph schema.
                    1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                      I wrote in detail about why byline transparency is vital to the success of any media organization. It's hard to see how Facebook's removal of bylines could be anything other than harmful to news literacy & media orgs. medium.com/@aramzs/authorship-value-and-the-medias-lost-profits-dabe7d1726c8
                      OpenGraph image for medium.com/@aramzs/authorship-value-and-the-medias-lost-profits-dabe7d1726c8
                      1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                        I've been checking other sites. It appears that the <meta name="author" tag is no longer being parsed by LinkedIn or Google+ either. Though it was never on an official spec, this tag was used by years to designate bylines on most social media sites.
                        1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                          Presumably the excuse for the depreciation of authorship data on social networks is the eventual adoption of schema(dot)org microdata markup, however even those sites who have adopted that markup or JSON-LD are not seeing it parsed by social media.
                          1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                            If you are curious to see if your page is implementing structured data properly, here's a useful tool: search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/
                            OpenGraph image for search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/
                            1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                              It looks like Facebook will use links to author pages (even though they no longer show in the debugger) but they only show up *after* you click an article. Still no bylines on the card.
                              oh my god twitter doesn’t include alt text from images in their API
                              1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                                And this may only be on mobile, as far as I've seen.


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