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Twitter rolls back policy on retweets that it coincidently implemented a month before election

December 17, 2020 | | Print Article

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Twitter announced Wednesday that it’ll be rolling back a policy it had instituted a month before the 2020 presidential election that had blocked users from directly retweeting a tweet and forced them to instead, go through an extra step in the retweeting process.

Announced in early October and ostensibly designed to discourage the spreading of so-called “misinformation,” the policy was instituted around the same time that bombshell allegations about Hunter Biden’s scurrilous business activities began to appear.

Prior to the policy, users had the option to either directly retweet a tweet or “quote retweet” it by appending their own commentary on top of the original tweet.

Here’s an example of a quote retweet (*Language warning):

Twitter’s policy basically removed the direct retweet option, thus forcing everybody to add their own commentary on top of the tweet they were retweeting.

In a new announcement Wednesday, Twitter claimed that it has decided to reverse the policy now — two days after the Electoral College voted to elect Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden to office — because it’s just now discovering the policy failed.

“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,” the left-wing social media network wrote.

“The increase in Quote Tweets was also offset by an overall 20% decrease in sharing through both Retweets and Quote Tweets. Considering this, we’ll no longer prompt Quote Tweets from the Retweet icon.”

View the full thread below:

The suspicious timing did not engender positive feedback.

Like one detractor sarcastically wrote, “You just happened to run a radical UX experiment over a presidential election, before reversing it once the electoral college had been determined, right?”

It appears so.

View more exasperated responses below:

Real stories were indeed censored by Twitter, as noted in the last tweet above. When the New York Post broke the allegations about Biden’s son in October, Twitter promptly pounced on behalf of the establishment media and censored the story.

Twitter eventually relented and unblocked the story, but by then other policies — such as the retweet policy — had already been instituted to ostensibly slow down the spread of so-called “misinformation.”

Speaking of “misinformation,” on Wednesday the social media network instituted another policy — this one pertaining to the spread of “misinformation” vis-a-vis the coronavirus vaccine.

“Starting in early 2021, we may label or place a warning on Tweets that advance unsubstantiated rumors, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines,” the network announced.

Yet the social media network has shown no interest in taking similar action against the myriads of tweets from high-profile leftists who’d claimed that the Trump administration would be unable to produce a vaccine by year’s end:

The social media network has also shown zero interest in taking action against the tens of thousands of tweets that falsely accuse President Donald Trump of colluding with Russia and being a Russian assert.

Case in point:

It’s almost as if Twitter’s so-called “misinformation” policies aren’t actually designed to limit the spread of misinformation but rather inhibit the spread of information that isn’t conducive to the Democrat Party’s preferred narrative …

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Vivek Saxena
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