Twitter will begin pushing its users away from its retweet feature for the duration of the US election, altering one of the fundamental building blocks of its service in order to slow the spread of fake news.
The fast-paced social network said on Friday that it will attempt to discourage people from uncritically sharing others’ tweets by asking them to write their own commentary first, starting on October 20.
It also expanded its fact-checking rules to include any United States political figure with more than 100,000 followers, slowing the dissemination of any tweets that it declares to be misleading.
Just as significantly, the company will reverse years of changes to its recommendation algorithms by no longer injecting content onto users’ timelines simply because it has been liked by the people they follow.
The new policies are Twitter’s sharpest departure yet from the Silicon Valley gospel that guided most of its history, which embraced "going viral" and sought to make sharing content as quick and easy as possible.
Instead, in a blog post, Twitter’s head of trust and safety Vijaya Gadde and its head of product design Kayvon Beykpour said they wanted to "increase context and encourage more thoughtful consideration".
Twitter has a critical role to play in protecting the integrity of the election conversation, and we encourage candidates, campaigns, news outlets & voters to use Twitter respectfully and to recognize our collective responsibility to the electorate…https://t.co/3flosgzkjs
— Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya) October 9, 2020
They said: "Though this adds some extra friction for those who simply want to retweet, we hope it will encourage everyone to not only consider why they are amplifying a tweet, but also increase the likelihood that people add their own thoughts, reactions and perspectives to the conversation."
Describing the changes to Twitter’s algorithmic timeline, they added: "This will likely slow down how quickly Tweets from accounts and topics you don’t follow can reach you, which we believe is a worthwhile sacrifice to encourage more thoughtful and explicit amplification."
President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign quickly lashed back, saying: "Make no mistake, this corporation is attempting to silence voters and elected officials to influence our election, and this is extremely dangerous for our democracy.”
Twitter has slapped misinformation labels and other restrictions on at least 14 of Mr Trump’s tweets this year, in one case even temporarily locking his campaign account, leading to accusations of bias from the President’s supporters.
The President himself has made Twitter a plank of his campaign, running Facebook adverts railing against Silicon Valley censorship.
This is an interesting call, almost the opposite of what FB has just announced it will be doing with Groups, where it plans to surface public group convos in nonmember feeds. (I usually liked seeing these tweets, personally.) pic.twitter.com/Np8nZbMd9c
— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) October 9, 2020
Interesting changes from Twitter. Ban on political posturing (like claims that someone won before official news). Interesting because it obviously triggers/shapes the political landscape/debate space. https://t.co/wwNbXFv3dn pic.twitter.com/dm0FrKDrIp
— Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) October 9, 2020
Retweets first began as a folk practice among Twitter users, who manually copied and pasted tweets that they wanted to boost with the phrase "RT" in front.
In 2009, Twitter added a dedicated button to re-share tweets, creating a viral rocket engine that has propelled the spread of social movements, trendy crazes and fake news campaigns ever since.
But by 2019, Chris Wetherell, the engineer who built the retweet button, had soured on the feature, saying: "We might just have handed a four-year-old a loaded weapon."
Now, users who hit the button will be taken to Twitter’s "quote tweet" interface, where they can attach their own commentary. They will still be able to retweet in the traditional way by typing nothing and then hitting send.
That extra step, while small, could provide an important increase in "friction", a force that Silicon Valley app designers have traditionally obsessed over minimising because of its potential to influence users’ behaviour on a grand scale.
Anti-misinformation campaigners welcomed the move. Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights described them as "really crucial", while Jesse Lehrich of the Left-leaning Accountable Tech called them "really encouraging stuff".
However, Andi McClure, a programmer who has suffered repeated harassment campaigns and long criticised Twitter’s quote tweet feature, said the change would "amplify harassment" by pushing users towards a known "vector" of abuse.
Earlier this year, Twitter also began telling users to read news articles before retweeting them, after testing showed users who saw the prompt opened 40pc more links.
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