Why is the journalistic standard to embed tweets (xeets?) instead of using screenshots?
An embedded tweet can be deleted, and depends on X supporting the functionality. If editing is ever introduced on the platform, it would permanently break all past articles that don’t have an independent record of the tweet (such as a full quote in the article or a screenshot). X can potentially (and maybe does) embed tracking features.
It seems like there are a lot of good reasons not to use embedded tweets, but almost every news source does it this way. Is there a good reason why?
As far as I remember it’s part of Xitters Terms and Conditions that if you want to show a tweet you need to embed it, otherwise you’re stealing it.
And for Xitter it’s great, they still can change or delete it, they run javascript on the news page to get all your information, etc.
Lol what are they going to do if I break ToS ban me from Twitter?
They don’t care about you but yes they would probably go after a newspaper and sue them for copyright infringement.
That suit would be practically impossible, as it’s clearly Fair Use.
Fair use is a defense you have to make in court. And court is expensive.
Fair use only covers critique, parody and education, and only with a whole bunch of extra nuance (e.g. you can’t just put a clip of yourself saying you didn’t like a movie at the end of the movie and get away with hosting it on your site by claiming it was critique, and you can’t download a PDF of a textbook and get away with it by claiming it was for education). Fair use lets you do a lot less than people think.
I hate Twitter but I despise articles that just post 3 tweets and provides a barebones AI recap of the conversation.
Can you imagine a precedent it would set. Twitter would never win.
If you’re a large online news outlet doing this repeatedly: Probably sue you.
Wait, comments on Twitter are NFTs now?