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Me again, here to talk about these links.
If you look at Harry’s other tweets, links to things like his Watermelon Sugar music video start with the same “HStyles.lnk.to” URL.
This comes from a paid third party service called a “smart link,” such as Soundplate. Record labels pay for these links for two reasons: they personalize the URLs to look nice and legitimize when artists share them, and, more importantly, they’re loaded with tracking abilities.
I think it was in pretty bad taste for Harry’s team to tweet the petition link using a smart link. But they did not send any traffic to his own website (that’s not even the URL of his website?) or somehow help the Change.org servers handle traffic by circumventing it (their servers don’t need any help, they’re huge). They just wanted to be able to see how much influence Harry had over his fan base when it comes to social justice with hard numbers.
All it succeeded in doing for me was proving that Harry himself didn’t tweet it, which is lame. I don’t think he needs to make a big scene, but a more personal tweet would be been nice.
Please spread the truth about this. Look up Soundplate or smart URLs for more info.