Twitter is bringing its ‘read before you retweet’ prompt to all users

Authored by theverge.com and submitted by rbevans
image for Twitter is bringing its ‘read before you retweet’ prompt to all users

Twitter says it’s working on bringing its “read the article before you retweet it” prompt to all users “soon.” The company began testing the prompt in June, which shows up when people go to retweet a story they haven’t clicked through to actually read.

Twitter says its motivation is to “help promote informed discussion.” Headlines often don’t tell the whole story and can even be actively misleading. Encouraging people to at least read the article they’re sharing seems like a smart way to promote media literacy and stop some of the knee-jerk reactions that can make misinformation viral.

More reading – people open articles 40% more often after seeing the prompt

More informed Tweeting – people opening articles before RTing increased by 33%

Some people didn’t end up RTing after opening the article – which is fine! Some Tweets are

best left in drafts — Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) September 24, 2020

Making the prompt smaller after you’ve seen it once, because we get that you get it

Working on bringing these prompts to everyone globally soon pic.twitter.com/08WygQi06G — Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) September 24, 2020

The company shared some results from its initial test of the feature, which was limited to Twitter users on Android. It says people shown the prompt opened articles 40 percent more often and that the overall proportion of people opening articles before retweeting increased by 33 percent. The company also said that “some people” (a statistically meaningless phrase!) didn’t retweet the article after opening it up.

Twitter says it’s now “working on bringing these prompts to everyone globally soon” and that in the future, the prompt will be smaller once it’s been shown to users once (“because we get that you get it”). This isn’t the only feature Twitter’s been testing to improve life on its platform. Others include a feature that warns users before they send offensive replies and the option to limit who replies to tweets (which has now been rolled out globally).

Hopefully all this experimentation is just a warm-up for the next logical step: a warning shown to all users before they tweet anything at all.

goldencrisp on September 25th, 2020 at 13:25 UTC »

Wish we could get away from the clickbait economy that relies on polarizing headlines. People arguing over what they think the article is about without fully reading it.

Of course, nobody has time to read everything and verify sources and claims.

rbevans on September 25th, 2020 at 12:50 UTC »

Some findings during testing:

📰 More reading – people open articles 40% more often after seeing the prompt. 📰 More informed Tweeting – people opening articles before RTing increased by 33%. 📰 Some people didn’t end up RTing after opening the article – which is fine! Some Tweets are best left in drafts 😏.

Living_Phantom on September 25th, 2020 at 12:38 UTC »

Here's to hoping this actually prompts people to read the article instead of opening the article and clicking right back out.