The results of Twitter’s experiment in making users read the content they share before sharing it have been very successful and will be available to the platform very soon.
In June, the Twitter platform introduced an experimental feature to Android users to encourage “read before you retweet” discussion, which is a feature that encourages users to open the article link and read it before retweeting because article titles often do not tell the whole story, and you may in turn be publishing content that causes debates and hostility or even publishing false and misleading content or containing hate speech.
After nearly four months of testing the feature, Twitter says that alerting users to read content before publishing it has been reasonably successful, as:
- Users opened articles before sharing them 40% more often than they did without this alert.
- Users in the test group opened and then retweeted an article 33% more often than they did without the notification.
- Some people ended up not reposting after opening the article – and that’s okay! Some tweets are better left in drafts
This is what the Twitter account said in a tweet explaining the success of the feature
“It’s easy for articles to go viral on Twitter,” said Susan Shih, Twitter’s director of product management. “Sometimes, this can be great for sharing information, but it can also be bad for hate speech, especially if people don’t read what they write on Twitter.”
A simple change in alerting users could be key to shifting the social media landscape to something less toxic and reactive.
Eliminating platform issues won’t be easy, especially for companies that rarely have the motivation to make meaningful changes. But reprogramming user behavior away from impulsiveness can help undermine the spread of misinformation, harassment, hyperpolarization, and other systemic problems we now see seeping through the thin barrier between online and offline life.
