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Ask HN: Is Twitter censoring Telegram links?

37 points by stereoradonc ↗ HN
I posted a link to my private channel on long-form. Telegram allows you to label invite links and identify the source of your subscribers joining in from specific metrics. I have been posting a similar link on Twitter, and it appears that t.me links are actively downplayed (even though the link is pinned). Does Twitter dislike other social media platforms?

23 comments

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gk1
The timeline algorithm strongly prefers tweets without links. That could be it.
zinekeller
This seems to be it. I've noticed that only about a tenth of tweets that is recommended has links, it's definitely in the best interest of Twitter for you to stay there, but they're not specifically targeting any platform. For instance, it is well-known that embedded videos perform better (in visibility) than linking up YouTube. (Of course, if you have strong evidence that Telegram links are specifically targeted, I'll want to know it.)
rvz
> Does Twitter dislike other social media platforms?

'Private platform' doing 'private platform things' (Censorship, banning, moderation, shadow-banning, perma-ban, removing and flagging tweets). Why should we care anyway?

This is all expected of a private platform.

zthrowaway
“It’s okay because it’s not effecting me.”
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo
IF they do it I guess it's scam mitigation we had to implement it in on a big public discord because 90% of telegram links are botspam or scammers same goes for link shorteners.
schleck8
Definitely. The amount of telegram spam on Reddit is insane, entire subs are being overrun by them.

Even of the telegram itsself in almost all groups i've been in there is telegram spammers.

anizan
Yes have noticed similar things. It seems Twitter has been taking a lot of inspiration from Instagram for engagement and they do upvote stuff to people's feeds based on virality. Similarly there's stuff which is not downvoted by engagement algorithm as much as disappear or shadow banned.
proxysna
Pin a qr-code to your channel instead. Far from ideal but it will work better. Twitter does not like posts with links in them.
stereoradonc
I did! Opened accounts on Instagram and Imgur and shared the QR codes instead. Thanks for the inspiration and the suggestion!
proxysna
hey, glad i was able to help.
skinnymuch
To be fair. Telegram has done an awful job mitigating spam and scams. It does not look like they do much of any thing. I am an admin for a local Telegram group and loosely have tracked the insane amount of spam and scammer accounts that join and get reported. It’s amazing how many never get shut down.

It’s also amazing how many have such obvious tells in their descriptions and their profile pics. For example, descriptions that are always similar saying looking for a good time or listing prices, linking to telegram channels listing prices for “services” or drugs or guns. Profile pics of porn stars or models, or otherwise taken from social media and now on telegram under a completely different name. The usernames and names of accounts commonly follow patterns as well. Don’t forget crypto shilling and scams.

I get not being happy with Twitter in general, but Telegram is purposefully not doing anything to mitigate their spam and scam problems.

Fatnino
I've been using tg for several years and I don't have a problem with spam. If you practice common sense and stay out of the giant public groups where anything goes you never have a problem. I'm in over 100 groups and interact with nearly 1000 people but I'm only in groups containing friends of friends so spam/scam doesn't happen.

Once that's out of the way, tg is light-years ahead of whatsapp (their most closely aligned competition) in terms of features and speed of upgrades and api openness. Whatsapp is the inferior product, where again I'm only in groups with people I know, but where as recently as this morning I got another spam from a Thailand number pretending to have texted a "wrong number" to get me to interact.

skinnymuch
I gave my example. Admin of a small public geo-local group chat. I don't think the proper answer in this context is to say use common sense and stay out of certain groups. The context is Telegram links commonly being spam and scams. Personally, I have no problem with spam/scams either. But why does Telegram not have more built-in anti-spam stuff. I'm a developer and didn't see any immediate anti-spam features in group chats.

I agree. Telegram is light years ahead of every normal chat, messaging app. Discord is a different sort of app. Oh and yeah, I get direct spam messages on Whatsapp more than Telegram. I barely use Whatsapp.

stereoradonc
Try the awesome "Miss_roseBot". Once you get the hang of it, it's easy. Alternatively, you can contact me on Telegram : ommahakaaleshvar (Search for the username) and I'll be happy to extend the assistance. If you need to administer a group, I'll be delighted to help.
stereoradonc
I never had any issue. I am managing some public groups AND the channels with zero spam. Most of the spam words are blocked and we are three admins who manage a rather large group on mechanical keyboards. Zero intereference.
skinnymuch
Don't you have to get third party bots/services to do the blocking? All of them do a lot of upselling and the first one I tried didn't work with blocking keywords. Then some of the bot interaction and config was becoming public and it isn't a good look. I love mechanical keyboards. People like us are not comparable to the regular population. If I cared more about the public group chat, I'd find a working bot to block keywords. But even then, I have to then either look for a keyword list, or see spam messages for what to block.

In the context of this thread, if Telegram is not doing any of this themselves, then it follows from my anecdotal experience, why so much spam and scams are proliferating around. And so Twitter blocking Telegram urls isn't necessarily ruthless corporate behavior.

stereoradonc
Third Party bots from trusted developers. Not every bot is the same. I can have restricted forwarding, and it's also impossible to have screenshots (unless the device is rooted).

I agree about the URL blocking, but for a platform that purports "free-speech", its hypocritical.

naomeux
I believe this is why I think they have noticed that Telegram is trying to get more traffic via Twitter, and thus the reason they're trying to suppress the exposure of TG links.
ffpip
Twitter blocks/restricts most of the links associated with Telegram (t.me , telegra.ph (their blogging platform) , telegram.me , etc).

Even if you manage to post the link by hiding it behind a link shortener, they show a warning to every person who clicks the link, which says the link maybe be unsafe (https://twitter.com/safety/unsafe_link_warning?unsafe_link=h...).

pengo
Any longform content I write at telegra.ph gets the URL stripped from my tweet, while the same content at graph.com (an alias) doesn't. So, yes, I think Twitter does censor Telegram links.