Facebook – How to Know If Your Post Has Been Shared on a Website

Facebook will use any open graph meta tags if present for the title, and image etc (eg, og:title). The facebook documentation for Open Graph Protocol explains this in more detail:

The Open Graph protocol defines four required properties:

og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "The Rock".

og:type - The type of your object, e.g., "movie". See the complete list of supported types.

og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1.

og:url - The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/.

In addition, we've extended the basic meta data to add two required fields to connect your page with Facebook:

og:site_name - A human-readable name for your site, e.g., "IMDb".

fb:admins or fb:app_id - A comma-separated list of either Facebook user IDs or a Facebook Platform application ID that administers this page. It is valid to include both fb:admins and fb:app_id on your page.

It's also recommended that you include the following property as well as these multi-part properties.

og:description - A one to two sentence description of your page.

I'm not sure how they do it for pages lacking these tags. If you're trying to duplicate this functionality then this is no help, sorry. But if you're trying to ensure your pages show up in the Publisher as you want then maybe this will.

You can also use the facebook opengraph debugger, which will provide info about your preview as well as (super handy) update their cached link if you make changes. Otherwise you can make changes to a link you want to share and the changes will not show up for days:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Eight Days of Malaise's answer seems to be the easiest solution to this, getting to the meat of the content.

Initially I would just say to block the app but, I've just realized Facebook is phasing out app profile pages which makes it more difficult to block an application. It seems that Facebook is saying it will only work before the app request or if you did not install it.

Click the Block App link in the left column

But this is not true.

From what it works for me, simply removing the application, then clicking "Recommend" seemed to do the trick, no app request was initiated.

Though when retrying a request to the WPSocialReader, if one cancels the request, the user is redirected to http://www.washingtonpost.com/ instead of Facebook home page http://facebook.com which I assumed would be the default behaviour after denying a Permissions Request (though they did state "click cancel to bypass"). Then again inspecting for a specific link

This works in your favor as you are redirected to the page when clicking cancel.

Now going back to first original share and clicking on it does seem to indicate Washington Post hijacking my links as they are indirectly letting themselves be endorsed through my links. On any subsequent request, the redirection goes straight through to Washington Times though.

The cookies are being saved here http://wpsocialreader.washingtonpost.com/ so that any subsequent request goes straight for redirection instead of the app.

Without

• sharing an extension/userscript with your friends that links directly to the respective Washington Posts articles
• setting the cookies for wpsocialreader.washingtonpost.com

there is nothing you can do for your friends.

For just you, simply cancelling the app request should work as long as you don't clear the cookies for wpsocialreader.washingtonpost.com.