With US election over, Twitter restores old reweet function

With the US Elections done and dusted and the main role of Twitter in dealing with its aftermath being flagging President Donald Trump’s continued attempts to discredit the outcome, the social media firm has returned the retweeting function to its old single-click ability.

“After learning from this product experience, we’re sharing an update: today Retweet functionality will be returning to the way it was before,” TwitterSupport tweeted.

Since October 20, the retweet button pulled up a prompt encouraging users to type in their own messages to go along with a reshared post: A bid to encourage individual commentary and discourage people from blindly amplifying tweets.

However, in reality, what happened was not necessarily more thought-provoking.

“Our goal with prompting QTs (instead of Retweets) was to encourage more thoughtful amplification. We don’t believe that this happened, in practice. The use of Quote Tweets increased, but 45% of them included single-word affirmations and 70% had less than 25 characters,” Twitter said.

“Since making this change, we observed a 23% decrease in Retweets and a 26% increase in Quote Tweets, but on a net basis the overall number of Retweets and Quote Tweets combined decreased by 20%. In short, this change slowed the spread of misleading information by virtue of an overall reduction in the amount of sharing on the service. We are taking more time to study and fully understand the impact of this change and are leaving it in-place for now,” Twitter said in a blog post.

Approximately 300,000 Tweets were labelled under Twitters Civic Integrity Policy for content that was disputed and potentially misleading. “These represent 0.2% of all US election-related Tweets sent during this time period,” the company added.

The move comes days after Facebook reversed an algorithm change that prioritised news from “authoritative” outlets over “hyperpartisan” sources, the New York Times reported.