Fighting twitter's censorship of substack

Twitter refuses to display the nice preview card for substack links, but this a silly ban that is easily defeated with some basic understanding of how the internet works

I know what you’re thinking: “does anybody really still use twitter?” The answer is yes! I’ve been on Twitter for ~10 years and only in the last 6 months has it become one of my favorite places on the internet.

This is in spite of, not because of, the rebrand to X and all the changes. It’s mostly because I stumbled on a really cool part of twitter where people are kind, curious, competent and love helping each other out. For more on this, see Nabeel’s post pontificating on why “Twitter is one of my favorite software tools in the world”.

There’s a change they did recently that really bothers me: they censor substack links. You can tell because posts that link to substack get significantly less views. They also don’t show the preview card:

This is what it should to look like:

This is the preview card it shows for any other external link. I generated this by copying the HTML from my substack article and re-hosting it on a different domain.

I found this super annoying, and really petty. To get around this, people started sharing screenshots of their article, and saying “link in bio”. But that was also annoying because I had to go out of my way to find the article.

It felt like I was being punished for choosing to publish on substack. I felt like it was stifling my discussions with friends. I found myself hesitant to share links to substack, lest it get the thread effectively shadowbanned.

I noticed that the lack of a nice preview card just made it less satisfying for me to share my writing. This seems like a small thing, but honestly, it’s a small luxury that I enjoy when I finish the grueling work of writing an article, and I didn’t like having that taken away from me.

Circumventing the ban

I thought it was kind of silly that they basically had this hard-coded check for substack.com:

if (link.contains(“substack.com”) === true) {
return; // do NOT show preview card!!
}

So I built a little tool that, given a substack URL, will copy the <meta> tags into a new HTML page and statically host that.

http://substack-proxy.glitch.me/

I didn’t really expect a lot of people to use this. I was trying to go out of my way to explain that, this tool doesn’t do much. It literally just copies and the HTML from substack and re-hosts it. You don’t even need to write code to do this trick: you can copy the HTML and paste it into a free static web host (GitHub Pages, Glitch, probably even any wordpress/squarespace/wix site etc?)

But it’s been really cool seeing people using it “in the wild”. So far there’s ~500 articles proxied through it, with the most popular tweet I’ve found using it having half a million views.

Twitter cannot ban this tool

This was the most important thing to me about this project: to illustrate to people that there’s nothing twitter can do to stop us from doing this. There is no way for them to ban a single website, without also banning ALL external links.

I put my tool on Glitch because it’s easy for anyone to fork it and deploy their own version (literally by just clicking the “Remix” button). I also put the source on GitHub, and I explained how to do it manually if you need to.

I think it was really important to me to exercise this sense of agency that we have? The internet is not like any other technology that we have had before. It really isn’t possible to censor.

I think it was really important for me that the average person understand this. That they are capable of archiving and re-uploading content that matters to them. They don’t need me or any other engineer to do it for them.

At its core the internet archive just copies HTML and re-uploads it. We can all do this. We can save the internet content we really like on our own hard drives, and share it with our friends.

I used to think this didn’t matter. Then I learned about this book by Ruby Thelot: A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints, a piece of internet culture that lives on because of the work of a single amateur archivist:

Does this tool really solve the problem?

A final note here: some skeptics have pointed out that this doesn’t fix the problem. Twitter still downranks ALL external links to keep people on the platform.

The skeptics are right. Twitter is still winning here. If you want the maximum amount of people to see your words, you’re going to have to tweet screenshots of your article, with no external links.

But I personally just feel much better not letting the company dictate what my content is going to look like when I publish it. The decentralized structure of the internet does give me some power, and I am going to use whatever power I have to make my online experience a little nicer. And I’m going to keep explaining to people how they too can help themselves.

The more I started thinking about this the more power I keep realizing we have. For example, Twitter have recently locked down access to their API (as did many other social media websites). But they can’t stop you from exporting your own data and making it freely available.

They can’t stop me from building a little offline archive of my & my friends’ tweets as we share our data together (because we want better search tools than twitter is willing to offer, or we want to create something that finds semantic connections between our tweets, or whatever!)

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Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

• I talk about this idea of “open source articles”, where I envision a web where I copy an article, tweak the HTML, add my own notes, and re-share that

• In “My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes” I talk about how I think the average person is more capable than we think, how we used to explain fundamental concepts about how computers work to laypeople

• “Feynman’s razor”: If an expert can't understand your explanation, you've dumbed it down too much

Attribution: “VS” icon in the article preview image created by iconfield - Flaticon