Twitter will carry out a new feature that will ask users if they've read the article before retweeting it. The social media platform hopes this prompt will help slow down the spread of misinformation and fake news, especially by retweets without actually reading the article.
Twitter and many other social media platforms have been trying to figure out how to deal with the tide of fake news and misinformation. A lot of people are using social media sites as their main way to get news reports. But social media's challenge is that anyone can share anything under the sun - telling out where stories come from, what's real and what's not is often difficult.
Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you Tweet it.
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. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 10, 2020
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Read before you Tweet, Twitter says
Twitter is rolling out a new feature that asks them to read an article before posting it, the company today revealed. It is featured "to help [the netizens] support informed dialogue," according to the announcement. "We cannot distinguish whether every single Tweet from every person is truthful or not," Twitter wrote in their blog.
As a company, the social media platform says it should not be the "arbiter of truth." The company also said the experiment will be running for at least a few weeks "to get enough data to make an educated decision about next steps." The prompt will pop up if a person tries to retweet an article they haven't clicked on.
It will be triggered based on whether a person has clicked on the link and read the contents. A Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the feature is available in English for people using Twitter on Android for now. Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour said the feature "can be powerful but sometimes dangerous" for those people who haven't read the content they're spreading.
One person on Twitter has already posted about seeing the new feature. "Headlines don't tell the full story," the pop-up said. "Want to read this before Retweeting?
I did read it, actually pic.twitter.com/sqikMwu0pV — Eric Tendian (@EricTendian) June 10, 2020
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Would the feature prevent passive-aggression posts?
Recently the social media platform launched a range of new measures to reduce the misinformation circulating on its website.
People who post links without reading the story they are referring to on Twitter may be in for automated passive-aggression.
It has labeled some tweets as false or misleading, including those claiming that 5G causes President Donald Trump's coronavirus and other posts.
Twitter has also announced on Thursday, June 11, that it removed more than 170,000 Beijing-backed accounts that have spread misinformation about the China-friendly coronavirus.
The social media platform had also withdrawn some 23,750 active accounts and 150,000 accounts for the "amplification."
Twitter determined that the network was an "echo chamber of fake accounts" with the help of researchers who analyzed those accounts, which Reuters reported.
It also disabled two smaller state-backed operations linked to Russia and Turkey, Twitter said.
