Twitter isn’t allowing users to post a link to Kickass.to stating that the URL in the tweet “appears to link to a page that has spammy or unsafe content.”
KickAssTorrents, which indexes millions of torrents, is the second most visited torrent site globally. The site is not only used for sharing copyrighted content, but is also used for quite a few legitimate purposes like sharing of Linux distros; self-published content including eBooks, videos, and songs among other things.
I tried clicking on one of the URLs sent to me by one of our publishers who wanted to share with us a draft copy of the soon to be published book and as soon as I clicked on it I was greeted with a rather unfamiliar message on Twitter.
“The site you were trying to visit may be unsafe! This link has been flagged as potentially harmful.”
This is something I haven’t seen a lot on Twitter and on asking our publisher friend about the source of the link, I learned that the link was originally that of Kickass.to. This led me to try out a little test of linking a random Kickass.to link and Twitter blocked the request with a message: “Oops! A URL in your Tweet appears to link to a page that has spammy or unsafe content.”
On clicking on learn more Twitter Help Centre page opened up suggesting quite a few different things, but a couple of statements caught my attention.
First Twitter suggests that users check with Google if the site is a malware or phishing site. If the site does show up as being flagged, it will be one of the reasons why Twitter has blocked it.
But the second statement is rather more relevant for kickass.to blocking as Google doesn’t really flag the site.
“Even if Google’s diagnostic report of the URL is clean, we may decide to continue blocking the URL on Twitter as potentially harmful.”
It seems that Twitter has decided to go ahead with the blocking of kickass.to domain on its own and we are not sure if the block will be lifted or more sites will be added to the roaster.
“but is also used for quite a few legitimate purposes like sharing of
Linux distros; self-published content including eBooks, videos, and
songs among other things.”
LOL!