Hi Matthew, the URL from a pasted Twitter/X link looks something like this:
xdotcom/philc411/status/1772703236778000488?s=51&t=bqU-DERO8RCyTR2vWjyt5E
You don’t need anything to the right of the question mark for the link to work, the s=blah and the t=blah are just tags that help X follow your activity around the interwebs and are for their benefit, not yours. They can be safely removed. Facebook and other socials do something similar. Hope that helps, cheers!
So that's how they do it. Fascinating!
Thank you for the education!
Is it the same characters with other socials? A question mark and then the s= and t= tags?
Anything after the “?” is a parameter, and not part of the page URL itself.
In *most* cases this is unnecessary junk you can remove, in *some* cases it forms part of the request you might need to keep. It’s easy to experiment by just trying it in your browser URL bar. Some parameters have obvious names and purpose, most will not.
For example:
Twitter: s, t - both unnecessary trackers
Facebook: fbclid- unnecessary tracker
YouTube: v, t - these are the actual ids of the video with an optional timestamp, both potentially relevant for you
Short article on this: https://medium.com/@ian-darwin/you-are-sharing-urls-with-tracking-links-please-stop-502c6f54895
