Yes, it can. At least, when using some social media links, such as Twitter. H/T to Alan Levine for sharing a collection of how to replace the simple, yet versatile curator Storify.
As Levine says:
WordPress has, and has had for a while, the ability to automatically embed social media content by simply putting the URL for a tweet, or the url of a youtube/vimeo video, the urls of a flickr photo, the url of a SoundCloud track as plain text on a blank line in the WordPress editor.
How does it work? Simply go to the HTML view of a blog post. Copy in the URL on one line, for example, to the tweet you want to add to your curated collection. You can also list links to YouTube and more. You can add text above and below, too, for context,as you could in storify.
Here’s an example, courtesy of some tweets by former JO304 student Alanna McDonough-Rice. Compare to an original Storify by alanna.
1.text here
2.text here
3.text here
Not bad.
Of course, you can always embed a tweet in a WordPress post. Like so — but there’s a lot more code behind the scenes:
Here in #jo304 with @nicole_ericson. She loves photography and took some awesome photos at last night’s @TerrierMBB game! As a Boston sports fan from Andover, MA, Nicole is excited for the Super Bowl this weekend!! pic.twitter.com/3rdD4oRLjc
— Matt Doherty (@m_doherty23) February 1, 2018
Storytelling in the digital age 