1964956 - Blockquote content should be displayed when platform.twitter.com/widgets.js is blocked

Status: NEW

(Core :: Privacy: Anti-Tracking, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Takanori MATSUURA]

If Firefox blocks content tracking by Twitter/X widget.js, a box is drawn in the content area.
If the web author follows the official embedding method which is provided at https://publish.twitter.com/, the content surrounded by the blockquote tag exists above it.

Firefox should display the blockquote content if Twitter/X widget.js is blocked.

Comment 1

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "a box is drawn in the content area."?

Could you perhaps upload a screenshot? Do you mean the placeholders we show when the embedded content gets blocked, see screenshot here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smartblock-enhanced-tracking-protection#w_enabling-embedded-content

Comment 2

[Takanori MATSUURA]

Attachment: Screenshot on Firefox.png

We face two problems:

• The statement in the box is not clear if I will be tracked by X when I click the button.
• The blockquote section is not displayed, even though we can display it without tracking.

Comment 3

[Takanori MATSUURA]

Attachment: Screenshot on Edge.png

The blockquote section appears on Edge.

Comment 4

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

Thanks! That seems like a worthwhile improvement.

Comment 6

[Ugi]

There's no need to display the blockquote itself. Providing a link to the content on its original website (in this case, Twitter.com or X.com) should do the trick, at least until a more robust solution is implemented.

Comment 7

[Takanori MATSUURA]

We want to avoid "tracking," but we don't want to block content that is not related to tracking.

Fortunately, the X embed block is not automatically tracked unless we run the script tag. To avoid automatic tracking, simply ignore the script tag that loads the widget script.
The X embed block is also designed to embed the comment content of the comment within the blockquote tag. This means that, if you ignore the script tag for auto-tracking, the comment can be treated as normal HTML content.

Users who want to avoid tracking more completely copy the URL in the blockquote tag by selecting "Copy Clean Link" from the context menu. Alternatively, you can install the "ClearURLs" extension or another similar one to avoid tracking. These users probably perform these operations on a daily basis.

Thus, at least in the case of X, certain considerations are made for users who want to avoid automatic tracking. This is in contrast to Facebook, where comments can only be embedded via a URL. As you said, in cases like Facebook's embedding system, as you say, indicating the link URL would be sufficient.

Comment 8

[Ugi]

Yeah, we currently have two options: allow X/TikTok/Facebook to track us on any site where we see the smart embed block or not have access to the content at all. That seems a bit unfair.

By the way, my issue, which was marked as a duplicate of this one, is more general and not centered on Twitter as this issue report is, since the smart block works on more social media platforms than just Twitter/X. And the solution proposed is the inclusion of a link to the content.