Twitter recommends reading articles before sharing them
After joining other social media giants in labeling misleading COVID-19 information by adding links to each coronavirus-related Tweet, leading to a trusted source on the matter, Twitter now continues to encourage its users towards having informed discussions.Namely, the company wants to encourage its users to read articles before sharing them, as a title rarely tells the entire story. In a recent tweet from Twitter’s support account, the company stated:
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.
In an additional tweet, the company continued by saying it wanted to test ways towards improving the health of a conversation as it begins. Twitter also wanted to check if reminding us to actually read articles before sharing them solely based on their source or title will lead to more informed discussions.
This move is indeed seemingly bound to have a positive effect on the community, as it has been previously documented that a majority of links shared on the Twitter platform are never clicked, suggesting that many users may instead rely on the information that’s available in a news article’s title alone.
Sunita Saligram, Twitter’s Head of Site Policy has previously told Reuters that the company is “trying to encourage people to rethink before posting because they often are in the heat of the moment and they might say something they regret.”
As stated, the new feature is currently being tested on Android users, and it’s yet not known if it will either also be added to iOS or promptly removed altogether.