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-...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Seems that everyday brings news that justifies me leaving FB.

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?

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.

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

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.

Facebook must be destroyed.

It looks like MySpace v2.0

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

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.

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

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

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

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

First Alex Jones. The this.

Way to go Facebook! /s

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?