Twitter will not load if connected to PIA

[DanAtkinson]

Summary

I am unable to access any pages on Twitter if the extension is enabled.

Steps to reproduce

1. Sign in to PIA and activate the extension.
2. Go to https://twitter.com/ and log in.
3. Visit any Twitter account such as PIA's - https://twitter.com/buyvpnservice

What is the current bug behaviour?

(What actually happens).
I get the following text:

If you’re not redirected soon, please use this link.

What is the expected correct behaviour?

(What you should see instead).

PIA's Twitter page.

Relevant logs and/or screenshots

I enabled logging on the extension and tried to go to the Twitter page again and this is the entire log: 🤷‍♂️

debug mode: enabled.

Below is a screenshot of what the page looks like.

Note that non-authenticated users can view the site fine, view tweets, and go through the login process. It is only once you are authenticated that things go wrong.

I cleared my cache, cookies, localstorage and nothing resolved the issue. Then I looked at the PIA extension, disconnected it and Twitter immediately started working again. I added twitter.com and *.twitter.com to the bypass list but this is seemingly not enough as, when I connected again, Twitter ceased working once more.

Looking at my network tab, two requests were made. One to https://twitter.com/buyvpnservice and another to https://twitter.com/push_service_worker.js. Both result in a 200 HTTP status code.

Possible fixes suggested remediation

I assume that, like Netflix, there is a magic domain not related to twitter.com which allows twitter to suddenly work, but I'm not currently aware of it, and I can't see any requests being refused.

Assignees and labels

~bug ~Windows

[DanAtkinson]

"Disable Website Referrer" needs to be disabled in order for Twitter to work. Is there any way to get this to work on a more granular level than just as a global setting?

[taesup]

This is a known issue with Twitter and our extension. Unfortunately, there's nothing that can be done with regards to disabling website referrer and making it more granular because it is a setting on Chrome/Opera that is either on or off.

[justinh00k]

This is a major issue for me. I know Twitter is a huge pain for developers, but hope PIA comes up with a solution.

[DanAtkinson]

I have found that the following settings resolve the issue for me.

I have uBlock Origin installed which more or less removed the need for MACE which I can't use as I work with Analytics, so if you have it checked, you shouldn't need to uncheck it in order for Twitter to work again.

[taesup]

@justinh00k The only setting that needs to be disabled is the "Disable website referrer" setting under the "Tracking" section. The rest can stay on if twitter is the only website you're having issues with. Sadly, this is something that can't be fixed on our side. Twitter will react the same way for any extension that blocks the website referrer from being passed in the request header. Also, this is a setting that is actually set on the browser so the extension does not mess with the request in any way. We just tell the browser to disallow this particular header and the browser does the rest.

[relative2]

I'm guessing what's happening here is that Twitter, when authenticated, checks the Referrer header on the server and if it's not from a list of twitter's owned domains then redirect the user back to the same page of twitter with its own Referrer header

Which means that the PIA extension can't be fixed easily.

[justinh00k]

@taesup hmm unfortunately this didn't fix it for me.
@DanAtkinson neither did that, although i don't see "third party cookies" as an option

i can't get to any twitter pages if i am logged in, but can if i'm not.

EDIT: correction, this does solve my problem in Chrome, just not in firefox!

[taesup]

@justinh00k So it looks like something is up with the Firefox Browser retaining some sort of setting that twitter doesn't like. I had to refresh Firefox (this will remove all user data and extensions, option can be found on the about:support page) before I could get twitter to work again.

After the refresh, I was able to install the PIA extension and disabling the "website referrer" setting allowed me to use twitter again. I'm unsure what put Firefox into a state where it can't reach twitter but this seemed to do the trick for me.

[justinh00k]

@taesup this fixed it for me! thank you!

[relative2]

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2018/twitter_silhouette.html

A recent blog post from Twitter on their engineering blog. I'll assume after reading it that this is the reason why Twitter wouldn't load when dropping the referrer header