What would be a reason to scramble posts’ dates during copy-and-paste (as Facebook recently started doing)?
As a UX engineer, I try to stay current with best practices.
I noticed that Facebook recently changed their HTML to be scrambled for the datetime of a post.
I'm wondering why that would be a good practice.
The screenshot below shows all of the nested span
elements.
What appears as "September 24 at 6:45 AM" is actually StfepltembretSopr 2oo4sacrnsg aut 6a:g4rl5t orefdmeASMsr ·
I.e. extra characters have been inserted in between certain characters of "September 24 at 6:45 AM".
After copying to clipboard and then pasting somewhere, the garbled text is what I see.
It seems like a deliberate attempt to prevent people from copying the datetime of a post. (But copying and pasting from the body of the post is still allowed.)
Why would this be a good practice?
P.S. I'm using Windows Chrome and am logged in to Facebook. When I try via Incognito (logged out), the datetime does not use nested span
elements, so copying-and-pasting is not garbled.