How to Get Headlines Back on Xitter (For Now)
(For website publishers/developers, not for web browser users)
For reasons having nothing to do with performance or utility, and apparently simply continuing Musk’s trend of slowly destroying Xitter, article links posted there no longer show a headline or text description; just the preview image with the site name superimposed on it.
These site previews, sometimes called “preview cards” or “summary cards” are not (exactly) generated by Xitter when you post a link. That is, Xitter doesn’t study the web page and figure out a summary image and text on its own. This information is set using HTML meta tags on the website. There are two similar standards for how to set set this information, the Open Graph protocol, and Xitter’s summary cards. Xitter obviously puts priority on Xitter meta tags (note that they still use “twitter”) over opengraph tags, if both are available. In addition, Xitter supports two card formats, “summary”, and “summary_large_image”. Everybody uses “summary_large_image” because bigger is better and you want people to notice your site.
So far, Xitter has only nerfed headlines on the summary_large_image card type. Cards of type “summary” still work as they always have. It’s not even clear how the headline and description could be nerfed here. Other than to make summary behave exactly like summary_large_image. I’m not saying Musk won’t do it. In fact there’s a good chance he will.
But for now, if site publishers want their headlines back, they can simply switch the “twitter:card” meta tag from “summary_large_image” to just “summary”, and abracadabra, headlines are back!
Note that the summary format is also forced if there is no image available. So you can just remove the twitter:image and og:image data from your website too, and also get headlines back, but obviously this is a suboptimal solution.
It should be possible to do this retroactively (to fix old articles). It used to be that Twitter would periodically rescrape web links to update preview cards, or you could use the card validator to force an update [EDIT: you can’t it’s off line]. This may continue to work under Xitter, however I haven’t tested it personally.
While this simple fix may be adequate, I should point out that the summary format is designed for square images, while the summar_large_image format uses landscape mode rectangles. So you might also want to update the images you’re using in these previews, though you should still get an acceptable result in most cases without updating them.
Now if you’re a site developer that handles HTML dev for a newspaper, this is all you need to know and you’re off to the races. But for anyone who publishes using any sort of website editor or wordpress or any of a thousand other tools for publishing stuff on the web without having to know HTML, you’re going to need some additional details.
Unfortunately, every website is different. It may not even be possible for you to make this change personally. At the very least though, you can send a link to this article to your site administrators and request them to make this change.
But most sites should let you change things. There’s generally some way to edit the HTML templates, or to edit the final HTML pages, that come out of their website editor software. The ideal way here is to edit a template, because then one edit can (hopefully) change all pages at once. Or, if generated pages are not dynamically generated every time, editing the template would at least apply to all new pages.
If editing your website template isn’t available, it may still be that you can edit the HTML of each individual page. This is more tedious, but it may be your only option.
So how do you make this change? You’re looking for something in the HTML that looks like this:
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="example" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="An article at Example.Com" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="This article is the best article." />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:title" content="An article at Example.Com" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.example.com/article.html" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/image.jpg" />There may be only “twitter:” meta tags, or only “og:” tags, but probably both. The simplest thing is to search for “summary_large_image” and replace it with “summary”. However it’s possible this is left unspecified, in which case you’ll need to find the other meta tags and add a line alongside them, just like the first line above, but with “summary” instead of “summary_large_image”.
That should be it. Depending on where you made this change and how your web publishing software works, the website may update automatically. Or you may need to tell it to regenerate each page from the template, or just somehow republish it. Use the card validator to check it, or just start editing a tweet, um I mean xit, on Xitter, where it should show the preview while you are still editing. [I currently can not get either of these to work and don’t know how to force a preview card update right now.]
But WHY?!?
Why did Musk make this change to Xitter? Some have speculated it somehow reduces load on their servers. This makes now sense. When a website is scraped, the title and description text is instantly captured from the meta tags. Images have to be downloaded separately, and they take up hundreds or thousands of times as much space as the text. And yes, Xitter does save this information locally, so there is small but real cost. But eliminating the text does not reduce that cost.
It should be incredibly obvious by now that Musk has an agenda he is pursuing, and that agenda is not related to any recognizable financial profit motive. I sarcastically covered this issue back in April, simply with a litany of many of the worst moves Trump had made by that point. He’s made many more since.
The first pair of images at the top of this article are the preview cards for an excellent article by Ben Collins, “What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter?”. And Marcy Wheeler also covered this recently, explaining how Musk has turned Twitter into a “Machine for Fascism”.
While these do explain the general trend, they don’t necessarily explain this specific move. Other than just making it less useful for sharing news items in general, the answer hasn’t been obvious. But Caroline Orr Bueno (@RVAwonk on Xitter) pointed out that this allows people to reframe what an article says with no other context. Given that most people are happy to be outraged by the text of the tweet and article title, rather than even clicking on the link, this is a powerful tool for those willing to lie, to tell even more baldfaced lies about content than they could before.
It also occurs to me that it prevents websites from fixing ambiguous headlines. Suppose a troll uses an ambiguous headline to claim an article says something it doesn’t actually say. The publisher could fix the headline, update the preview card, and harm the purpose of the troll’s use of that link.
It’s also worth noting that advertisers still can create links with text attached. So I’d hardly be surprised if this suddenly became a paid feature. Perhaps you’d need to pay to see the old style view, or perhaps only paying customers could post links that would display the headline (for all).
In any case, this is bad for the site as a useful medium, and in that respect, it definitely serves Musk’s apparent purposes.