The experiment failed to encourage people to add their own thoughts to the conversation.
What you need to know
- Twitter’s quote tweet experiment is finally coming to an end.
- It will no longer prompt quote tweets and is re-enabling the usual retweet behavior.
- Twitter had rolled out an update to prompt quote tweets instead of retweets to fight misinformation before the U.S. elections.
Back in October, Twitter rolled out an update that encouraged users to quote tweets, instead of retweeting them. The change was aimed at fighting misinformation on its platform during the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Twitter has now announced in a blog post that it is ending its quote tweets experiment and re-enabling the standard retweet behavior. You will no longer see the quote tweet prompt when you try to retweet something.
Twitter says the experiment failed to achieve its goal of encouraging more thoughtful sharing. Even though the use of quote tweets saw a 26% increase since it made the change, nearly half of them included single-word affirmations, and 70% had less than 25 characters. The experiment also led to a 20% decrease in sharing on its platform through both retweets and quote tweets.
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. (2/4)
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 16, 2020
While Twitter has given up on prompting quote tweets, it plans to continue to focus on “encouraging more thoughtful amplification” through multiple solutions. One such solution, which Twitter has found to be effective, is prompting users to read articles before sharing them.
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