Why is the journalistic standard to embed tweets (xeets?) instead of using screenshots?
An embedded tweet can be deleted, and depends on X supporting the functionality. If editing is ever introduced on the platform, it would permanently break all past articles that don’t have an independent record of the tweet (such as a full quote in the article or a screenshot). X can potentially (and maybe does) embed tracking features.
It seems like there are a lot of good reasons not to use embedded tweets, but almost every news source does it this way. Is there a good reason why?
They don’t care about you but yes they would probably go after a newspaper and sue them for copyright infringement.
That suit would be practically impossible, as it’s clearly Fair Use.
Fair use is a defense you have to make in court. And court is expensive.
Fair use only covers critique, parody and education, and only with a whole bunch of extra nuance (e.g. you can’t just put a clip of yourself saying you didn’t like a movie at the end of the movie and get away with hosting it on your site by claiming it was critique, and you can’t download a PDF of a textbook and get away with it by claiming it was for education). Fair use lets you do a lot less than people think.
I hate Twitter but I despise articles that just post 3 tweets and provides a barebones AI recap of the conversation.
Can you imagine a precedent it would set. Twitter would never win.