Twitter Testing New Feature to Get You to Read an Article Before Retweeting
“It's easy for links/articles to go viral on Twitter. This can be powerful but sometimes dangerous,” the company’s CPO wrote.
Kacper Pempel/Reuters
Twitter is testing a feature in its Android app that will prompt users to read an article before they retweet it. If a user wants to retweet an article they have not opened, the app will prompt the user to open it. It’s unclear how long the test will run and what the threshold is for success. Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s chief product officer, wrote, “It's easy for links/articles to go viral on Twitter. This can be powerful but sometimes dangerous, especially if people haven’t read the content they’re spreading.” Twitter has promised many times to improve the quality of interactions on its eponymous social network, which has long been criticized for enabling harassment and the spread of misinformation.
Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you Tweet it.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 10, 2020
To help promote informed discussion, we're testing a new prompt on Android –– when you Retweet an article that you haven't opened on Twitter, we may ask if you'd like to open it first.
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