Twitter is changing how you retweet temporarily ahead of the November 3rd US presidential election, to assist stop abuse and the extent of misinformation.
Don’t be worried about how to retweet; you’ll still be able to retweet. But till at least the end of election week, it won’t be as easy as normal to retweet something like any video, text, or image to all of your followers.
When you click or tap the retweet icon, Twitter will pick up the Quote Tweet composer to assist you in writing something about that tweet before you share it.
You don’t have to write anything if you don’t want to —leave the composer blank and hit the retweet button to retweet like you usually would.
But Twitter is expecting that by adding some friction into the process, people might rightly consider precisely what they’re retweeting or take the possibility to add their view.
The modifications to retweets aren’t the only variations you might see to your Twitter experience.
Twitter also won’t display “liked by” or “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow, and the trends box will only show trends with added additional context.
Like the changes to retweets, these tweaks will be in position until at least the end of election week in the US, according to Twitter. All of these changes were first declared on October 9th.
Tweets that involve premature declarations of victory will be marked, tweets meant to induce interference in the election or election results will be subjected to removal, and tweets from political figures with more than 100,000 followers which involve residents Trump that is labeled as “misleading” will be harder to access.
The temporary modifications will put the brakes on how most people can use Twitter. Users will be promoted to “add their own commentary” before retweeting something, propelling them toward the quote tweet option instead.