After a change to its Graph API, Facebook removed the ability to edit a link preview, its image, title and text, before sharing it on the platform. The change was announced three months ago at F8 and took effect last week.
Spammers, scammers and “clickbaiters” use link preview editing as a way to post fake news, so Facebook is disabling this feature. I'm sure most of you have used it before, especially when sharing a link that doesn't contain an optimized title, subtitle or image on Facebook. You may even have tried to share a link and found that a different title or image would be more effective for a particular audience. Whatever the case, as of July 17 you can no longer edit link preview information.
But Facebook knows there are publishers that “have workflows that depend on overwriting link preview metadata,” and it is working on a solution for them. The company also says it will provide “tools and resources” to support them.
Until we learn of a proper solution, Facebook promises it will make announcements in the coming weeks. The only way to do it would be through ads, that is, running different iterations of a post that has been created as an ad. Of course, there is also the obvious option of using the correct Open Graph meta tags to make your link previews look the way they should. You can control these through your site's CMS or code, but you can't do that when you share someone else's content, right?
Spammers, scammers and “clickbaiters” are out!
This is why we can't have nice things, a few ruin it for everyone.
Source: wersm
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