Twitter’s experiment to get you to read stories actually worked

By Allison Matyus Published September 24, 2020

You’re more likely to actually open and read articles you see on Twitter if they nudge you to not share them first, according to results from a Twitter experiment.

Twitter’s test prompted Android app users to open an article before retweeting it.

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Twitter shared the results of that feature on Thursday and concluded that people open articles 40% more often after seeing that prompt. People also opened articles 33% more before retweeting it, and Twitter noticed that some people held off on retweeting messages after getting the prompt.

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https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1309178716988354561?s=20

The new initiative was Twitter’s way to help promote informed discussion on the platform rather than have people blindly repost articles before actually knowing what they are about.

Moving forward, Twitter said that it’s going to tweak the notification to be smaller after you’ve initially seen it and that it will bring these prompts to all users soon.

Digital Trends reached out to Twitter to get an estimated timeline of when you can expect the prompt to show up on your feed. We will update this story when we hear back.

Facebook added a similar notification about reading articles in June to “help people understand the recency and source of the content before they share it.” Facebook’s notification tells you how long ago the article was first shared and its original source as a way to combat outdated news that can often misrepresent current events.

Both social networks have ramped up how they are handling misinformation on their platforms ahead of the 2020 election by labeling politically tied accounts or media, banning deepfakes, and more.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…

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Twitter experiments with a major change to hashtags

The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

Update October 13, 2022: Twitter reached out to Digital Trends to clarify a few points about its current experiment with hashtags and had this to say:
This is a temporary test visible to a small number of people on web only. We have no plans to remove hashtag functionality on the platform.
Clickable hashtags are kind of important to how people experience Twitter. Clicking through hashtag links is a convenient way to find more tweets related to specific and niche topics. And they're so useful for browsing content that other popular social media platforms (like Instagram and TikTok) have them too.

So why would any platform, especially Twitter, want to experiment with reducing the functionality of such a feature? We don't know. But apparently, that is what's happening. On Monday, Jane Manchun Wong tweeted a screenshot of what appears to be an experimental change to how hashtags work on the bird app. In this case, as Wong notes, that change apparently involves having hashtags without clickable links "unless the tweet contains branded hashtags like #OneTeam and #Periscope that brands pay to add an icon next to hashtags for a while to promote stuff."

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More Twitter users will soon see fact-check notes on tweets

The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

Birdwatch, Twitter's community fact-checking pilot program, is expanding and getting a few updates. And for users in the U.S. that means more of them will be seeing a few tweets in their timelines that feature notes which add context to the tweets themselves.

On Wednesday, the official Twitter account for the bird app's Birdwatch program posted a series of tweets announcing its expansion.

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Twitter’s latest features are all about curbing election misinformation

Twitter's new election-specific features shown on a smartphone.

As the midterm elections approach in the U.S., one social media platform this week has announced further measures it will take to combat misinformation in the lead-up to this fall's congressional elections.

On Thursday, Twitter published a blog post in which it detailed its plans on curtailing misinformation on its platform, especially as it relates to the 2022 U.S. midterm elections. Of particular note was a series of new misinformation-related features Twitter plans to launch for use in the months leading up to the midterm elections.