Now, Twitter will nudge you to read before retweeting
Twitter is going to new heights to keep conversations healthy on its platform. A few weeks back, the micro-blogging service started warning users to rethink about their 'harmful' replies, and now, as part of the same effort, it is testing a capability that prompts you to read an article before actually retweeting it to your followers. Here's more about it.
If you share articles without opening, Twitter's prompt will appear
As part of the latest change, people who choose to retweet an article without opening it will get a nudge to read through the post first and then share it with anyone. However, the feature will not stop you from retweeting before reading; it will just suggest you to read first, more like a healthy practice that should be followed.
The feature was tweeted by Twitter Support
"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," Twitter Support said in a tweet announcing the new feature.
Goal to enable informed and meaningful conversations
By prompting users, Twitter hopes people will be able to "promote informed discussions" and refrain from sharing controversial/divisive/misleading posts, something that often sparks arguments and results in inflammatory comments and hate on the service. Not to mention, this may also change the general habit of sharing things on social media just by looking at the headlines, which can often be clickbaity, of stories.
What Twitter's Product Lead said about the feature
Test with limited users at this stage
As of now, the new prompt is being tested with select people using Twitter for Android in English, in the US. However, we expect, the company will expand the feature to more languages, regions, and platforms in the near future, given how aggressively it is trying to bring controls aimed at driving healthy and meaningful conversations.
Other capabilities aimed at promoting healthy conversations
Notably, in addition to this, Twitter is also testing a feature that automatically detects harmful tweet replies and asks users to reconsider their response as well as an ability to limit who could reply on tweets. Then, there is also the test of Fleets - Twitter's own version of self-disappearing Stories - in India, Brazil, and Italy and a cleaner interface for threaded conversations.
