Link: https://www.airdatanews.com/boeing-777-f-production-reportedly-halted-for-nearly-two-months-by-supplier-dispute/

On mobile if I try to copy a paragraph or two to my web browser clipboard it literally won't on this website.

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.

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 I picked to add a personal touch and thus encourage people to read the full article you assholes, but ok fine I will never go to this website again.....

Oh wait but I can feed ALL of the text into Google's AI slop machine just by swiping down because of course I can still do that, that makes sense.

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

I specifically DO NOT want to copy the whole article though! I just wanted to quote a small section as a teaser and window into the full article.

This kind of tit-for-tat mindless evolution of UI design just slaps me in the face because the website has defended itself against AI slopscrawlers by.... locking out a human trying to share two paragraphs they picked from their article and still letting the slopcrawlers take it all anyways....

What does a publication have if they do not have word of mouth advertising? Why has AI so thoroughly broken peoples' ability to critically think?

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.

The weirder part is that AI scrapers don't give a damn about selecting paragraphs out - so this feature is either incredibly poorly thought through, or was outright intended to prevent exactly what you're trying to do.

Dragging and copying is also working for me on Firefox for Android. E.g.:

Three Boeing employees familiar with the situation told Reuters that 777F production had not resumed by October 23 despite Boeing and Florida-based supplier Vaero reaching a settlement in late September.

[...]

Some additional 777Fs could still be handed over before the end of 2026 because their wings were assembled before the supplier dispute, according to employees cited by Reuters.

Edit: And a courtesy link to the original Reuters article.

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.

Thank you for the courtesy link, I am sure there are ways to do it, but I shouldn't have to.

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....

i can copy anything from there on fennec with ublock

Firefox mobile + reader view = problem solved

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.

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.

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.

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

You got half of it spot on correct. The other half is........ they don't want humans copypasting their stuff. Which is arguably reasonable, but we're gonna do it anyway. heh

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.

Thank you. I haven't encountered this yet in my Firefox forks yet but I'll be sure to turn them off.