Twitter provides all users with a “read before retweet” prompt

Twitter says so working About displaying the prompt “Read the article before retweet” to all users “immediately”. The company started Test the prompt in June, Appears when you click to retweet a story you haven’t actually read.

Twitter says its motive is “to help facilitate informed discussions.” Headlines often don’t give the big picture and can even be positively misleading. Encouraging people to read at least the articles they share seems to be a wise way to promote media literacy and stop the terrible reactions that can spread false alarms.

The company shared some results from the initial testing of the feature, but this was limited to Twitter users on Android. It shows that people opened articles faster than 40% more often, and it says that the overall percentage of people who opened articles before retweet increased by 33%. The company also states that “some people” (a statistically meaningless phrase!) Did not retweet after opening the article.

Twitter is currently “working to make these prompts available to everyone in the world right away,” and once they appear to users in the future, the prompts will be smaller (“because they got it”). This is not the only feature that has been tested to improve life on the Twitter platform. Other features include a warning to the user Before they send offensive replies And options Limit users to reply to tweets (It is currently being rolled out globally).

Hopefully all this experiment is just a warm-up to the next logical step. That is, all users will be warned before they tweet anything.