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@supersquirrel@lemmy.ca

2026-10-24 17:34 UTC

"We copied a summary of the article instead of the full text" - hostile UI design blocking quoting of an article On mobile if I try to copy a paragraph or two to my web browser clipboard it literally won’t. I assume this is because of AI scraping or whatever but this has got to be the most insulting, condescending UI design I have encountered in a long time. Also I called this happening and I distinctly remember people laughing at me about saying this would happen. Ughhh. Also yes I know there are probably a million ways to get around this but the point is this is just so fucking pointlessly stupid. This is what it looks like on android. I wanted to share your article with an interesting quote and thus encourage people to read the full article you assholes, but ok fine I will never go to this website again…

Replies (12)

  • @Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2026-10-24 17:57

    Select all -> Copy is working fine for me using firefox on android mobile, at least.

    Open ##5229201

  • @ture@lemmy.ml 2026-10-24 18:07

    You can do this kind of JS fuckery and overwrite the default copy behaviour. document.addEventListener("copy", (event) => { event.clipboardData.setData( "text/plain", "This is the text that will actually be pasted!" ); event.preventDefault(); }); Though I would always consider this super hostile design. The only sane place where something like this should be is a copy button you can click to automatically copy something into the clipboard.

    Open ##5229285

  • @supersockpuppet@lemmy.world 2026-10-24 18:25

    Seems to work on Firefox nightly with unlock origin

    Open ##5229456

  • @emmanuel_car@fedia.io 2026-10-24 20:01

    Yeah that’s crazy. Funnily enough though on iOS Safari I can select the text I want, then drag it to a text field in another app. I could also screenshot the text and grab it from the screenshot if I were that interested.

    Open ##5230205

  • @n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca 2026-10-24 20:12

    I don’t know how it works, but I’ve had similar with economictimes.indiatimes.com and it’s on pc too, just copies a few words and then "read more at Https…

    Open ##5230380

  • @mybuttnolie@sopuli.xyz 2026-10-24 20:35

    i can copy anything from there on fennec with ublock

    Open ##5230554

  • It looks like you can copy snippets that don’t include an end-of-paragraph. I don’t like it either, but I would guess this was supposed to be a feature, a benefit, not a way to prevent AI scraping. I don’t think it would prevent AI scraping.

    Open ##5231842

  • @Damage@feddit.it 2026-10-24 23:05

    Firefox mobile + reader view = problem solved

    Open ##5231843

  • @th3dogcow@lemmy.world 2026-10-24 23:30

    Wow what asshole design. Never come across that before. On iOS you can freely copy any text selection in reader mode in Safari. Perhaps something similar could work on android.

    Open ##5232062

  • @Ledivin@lemmy.world 2026-10-25 00:35

    This is definitely entirely unrelated to the AI ecosystem. It doesn’t stop scraping, and nobody with any experience in the industry would think it does. I don’t know why they created this feature, but it has nothing to do with LLMs.

    Open ##5232601

  • @e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-10-25 00:40

    You can prevent such nonsense in Firefox by disabling JavaScript clipboard events by setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled to false in about:config.

    Open ##5232728

  • @daychilde@lemmy.world 2026-10-25 02:58

    You got one correct answer to the question asked, which is “why”. And it has nothing to do with AI. This has been a thing on websites for 20 years - not many, but some. They use javascript to choose what to copy to the clipboard. As others noted, there are ways around it. For the why? Well, to try and prevent precisely what you were doing. There are ways of making it more difficult (impossible for the average or lightly-teched user) to save/copy images, for example. Some sites attempt to do that. It’s all a matter of trying to protect what they’ve published. Which is certainly legally their right. But is also pretty easy to get around - at least on desktop. I haven’t had to bother on mobile, myself.

    Open ##5233838