Twitter tries to prevent people from sharing unread articles. In an experiment, it hopes the company will "promote informed social media discussions."
In the test, which was pushed on some Android users, the company immediately asks people whether they really would like to tweet a link they didn't touch.
Twitter said in a tweet, "Through the sharing of an article you may want to read it before you retweet." "When you're retweeting an post you haven't opened on Facebook, we 're checking a new alert on Android – if you'll open it first, maybe."
Without reading, the problem of sharing links is not new. One 2016 analysis by Columbia University's and Microsoft computer scientists showed that 59% of the connections shared on Twitter had never been tapped.
Another report , titled "Study: 70 percent of Facebook users just read the headline of research articles before comment," was a less scholarly but more relevant article the same year – the Science Post fake news website ran 127,000 shares for an article which is virtually entirely lorem ipsum filler.
The solution of Twitter is not to ban retweets of this kind but to inject "friction" into the process, so as to encourage certain customers to rethink their social network activities. This is a more recent move by the organization to boost the "Web Security" without allegations of censorship.
The company began testing in May to encourage people to "monitor" their replies if they chose to submit offensive tweets to others. "You might say stuff you don't mean when things get heated," explained the company.
"We do a small experiment on iOS, with a pace which helps you to revision your response before it is written, if it uses harmful language."
That is a less effective move, because the filter of the business is as friendly – albeit bumbled – to chat to friends as it is truly cruel to other speakers.
"We 're trying to encourage people to reflect and rethink their language before posting, because people often are in the heat of the moment and could say something they deplore," said Twitter 's global trust and security head.
