I regularly monitor the developer feeds of platforms to understand the technology, business, and politics of their work. One thing that caught my eye yesterday was the removal of oEmbed author_name and author_url fields by Meta. They did this for posts and videos, giving quite a blow to the concept of authorship when it comes to the social media platform.
One has to ask why? What is the motivation for disappearing authorship for posts and videos? I suspect it is similar to why many tech companies have also opted to remove authorship from blogs or using a generic name, as well as removing dates from blog posts. These types of moves always worry me. First as an author I demand that my name be front and center for anything I post, but second it is just a sign that the machines are winning and humans are losing.
Authorship matters. There is a reason these properties exist and there is a reason that Meta does feel they are worthwhile sharing any more. I already don’t share my intellectual property and creative work via Facebook, and this provides more validation of my approach to keep things published within my domain and syndicate via only platforms that help me amplify MY VOICE, something that clearly Meta and other AI wielding companies are not interested in in.
