In June 2020, Twitter support announced on its platform that they were testing a feature on Android where you would have to read an article before retweeting it to promote educated debate instead of keyboard warriors.
On 24 Sep 2020, they announced their testing was complete and they had achieved very good results of the testing. Their studies confirmed that:
- 40% more people open the article before retweeting it if they are prompted to do so.
- 33% more people read an article before retweeting it.
- Some people still didn’t open an article before retweeting it.
The purpose of this feature is to reduce the amount of fake news that gets tweeted as well as people knowing the whole context of something before retweeting and as you can see above it has gotten really positive results.
Now that the testing is complete, Twitter is going to be releasing this as an update globally although they did not give any timeline so we don’t know when to expect it but nonetheless it is going to be soon.
They also confirmed that they will be making the prompt smaller so it doesn’t get annoying for its users that don’t want to read the articles or who have already read the articles before. Some users may still get annoyed by the update, but as per the test results, informed sharing of information outweighs the annoyance to a few so hats off to Twitter for trying to curb this problem.
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