Twitter wants you to read before you retweet any article

Twitter is working on bringing the ‘read the article before you retweet it’ prompt for all users soon. The platform had started testing this feature in June un this year and the prompt would appear when users were retweeting an article/story they had not clicked through to actually read it.

Twitter said that this feature is being brought in to promote informed discussions.

This follows the truth about headlines - they often don’t tell the whole story and can be misleading. Encouraging people to read the article they want to share is a logical way to promote media literacy and stop some “knee-jerk reactions” that can make misinformation go viral.

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Twitter shared some results from the tests it ran in June when the feature was rolled out to Twitter users on Android only. Results showed that people shown the prompt opened articles 40% more and the overall percentage of people opening an article before retweeting went up by 33%. 

While Twitter did not furnish any numbers for this, there were some people who didn't retweet an article after opening it.

Twitter is not working on bringing these prompts to everyone globally. After this feature rolls out, Twitter is going to make the prompt smaller once it has been shown to the user once. 

The idea behind this is a smaller prompt should be sufficient for users to be reminded that they have not read the article.

Besides this, Twitter is also working on a feature that warns users before they send offensive replies.