Remove All Traces of Social Media On My Website?

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Is there a way to remove all traces of social media on my website? I am not sure if it is built into Discourse or if it’s a theme-specific thing, but in the source code, there are 5 mentions of Twitter & a mention of FaceBook on each page if you View Source. They are:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://forums.mysite.me/uploads/default/original/1X/9c81453y45yh45ha81cedd21d3cf20.png" />
<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://forums.mysite.me/" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="SiteTitle" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Site Description Is Here" />

And under <div class="hidden" id="data-preloaded" data-preloaded=,
the mention of FaceBook is: \&quot;facebook_app_id\&quot;.
My site is extreme privacy-focused, so those being on the site isn’t a good look.

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Those see so if someone embeds a public post on Facebook it’ll make a pretty embed. It’s not sending anything to Facebook or anywhere else.

I think it will be very difficult to remove.

1 Like
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You can use CSS modifications and edit the text to remove any mention of social media apps from your site.

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This is metadata for oneboxing, so that when someone posts a link to your website on Twitter it can show you what the link contains.

No more information is exposed than what is already public.

This is the value of your facebook_app_id site setting so the Discourse client can use it if it’s configured for login. Don’t set it and it won’t have a value.

Removing the presence of those arbitrary strings in the HTML you serve would not serve any practical purpose; any fears based on the presence of them are unfounded.

If it would make your visitors more… comfortable… you could set up a web filter to blindly search and replace the words twitter and facebook in your responses? That’ll probably break something (e.g. settings editing) and they would no longer be able to talk about REDACTED or REDACTED, but it would do.

I don’t see anything actionable here that serves a meaningful purpose.

Do you have a specific goal other than “don’t talk about X”?

2 Likes
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Is it possible to turn off the oneboxing in a selective way?

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Would love to know.

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Incoming oneboxing?

Please clarify what you mean by “in a selective way”.

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I can imagine different subsets of people wanting not to have any direct connection to Google (Youtube) or Twitter (X) or Facebook (Instagram) properties, but still wanting oneboxes for Wikipedia or for general well-behaved websites and blogs. So I’m thinking a blocklist of domains might be a mechanism, if there isn’t already one.

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Note this is about incoming oneboxing, not outgoing.

You can already control outgoing oneboxing behaviour with the blocked onebox domains, allowed inline onebox domains, allowed onebox iframes site settings.

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I was following the thinking here:

So if I post a link like this

it gets a onebox. And when that onebox is rendered in the browser of a user of this forum, their browser fetches

![](upload://2x05H3d8R8vOrHpdhIvbyayu0uN.jpeg)

which means Twitter/X gets a request from that user. Such a request can be used to track, I think. Even if not, this is I think the case that’s being considered potentially problematic. If I’m right, then some way to avoid one-boxing links which resolve to specific domains would be desirable. And by that, I mean when the forum culture is very privacy sensitive, or anti-capitalist, or whatever, then the forum admin might want to arrange that forum pages don’t irritate forum users.

The spirit of my thinking is that some subcultures might want to set up and use forums, using Discourse, and have some control over the way those forums interact with third parties. The forum admins would be motivated to sort that out. Such situations might not be entirely mollified by suggestions that every user should sort out their own filtering.

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That’s not the topic at hand however, they’re asking about disabling Discourse’s onebox data for external sites.

1 Like
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OP can’t reply for another 3hrs, but wanted me to pass on:

@Ed_S “And by that, I mean when the forum culture is very privacy sensitive, then the forum admin might want to arrange that forum pages don’t irritate forum users.” Exactly. But not “irritate” users, I just don’t want any social media ties to my site, all all, period.

@Firepup650 Yeah, I don’t want to see any social media mentioned in the site code whatsoever.

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It looks like @system was eager to prove you wrong, and it downloaded the Twitter PFP image. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Either way that’s outbound oneboxes, as @supermathie mentioned, and that’s not this topic.

2 Likes
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Ah, I think I see - the topic is about posting forum links on social media platforms? Maybe?

Good point that the Twitter image was fetched and cached by the forum, and so the end-user might indeed not find their browser fetching Twitter content. (I checked, but I checked in preview, not after posting.)

1 Like
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Yeah, regardless, would like zero social media mentioned in the site’s code if possible.

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I don’t know how hard it is to override a private function, but my first attempt failed.