Twitter Will Now Mask All URLs With ‘t.co’ Wrapper

Twitter is now masking all urls passed through the service with the t.co wrapper. Before today, Twitter had been wrapping urls longer than 20 characters. Now they are masking all urls, regardless of length, in both tweets and direct messages alike.

Twitter wants to learn more about its users. To do that, it needs to be able to track what users are sharing. Today Twitter publicly stated that they will be filtering and analyzing urls for malicious content. But the data they gather will also include links to non-malicious content. Twitter hopes to mine this data — the non-malicious content — to better understand how users interact with the service.