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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):
What the absolute fuck? Get your US election bullshit out of my non-US Twitter account’s functionality. We didn’t need more evidence that the US considers itself the sole center of the universe. https://t.co/8N79YXlqif
— Rami Ismail (رامي) (@tha_rami) October 10, 2020
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:
After learning from this product experience, we’re sharing an update: today Retweet functionality will be returning to the way it was before.
Here’s what we saw while we prompted Quote Tweets (1/4): https://t.co/MzoDKy3d69
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 16, 2020
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
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. For more details: https://t.co/Were7yWdOz (3/4)
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 16, 2020
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:
This is incredible. Two weeks before the election Twitter changed how you retweet because they obviously didn’t want certain things to go viral. Now that they got the result they want, they’re going back to the old way.
Big tech is manipulating us in ways we can’t imagine. pic.twitter.com/J7jH0ogqli
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) December 16, 2020
Well it’s a good thing you didn’t try it out during an election. It might look like you were trying to skew the results, you fucking hacks. https://t.co/pEeZ94on3E
— Michael Killdozer (@MikeDeKulak) December 17, 2020
They think we’re all dumb https://t.co/w4XwRATQsY
— Heimish Conservative (@HeimishCon) December 17, 2020
Yeah election is over, so why not right?! Just screw over anyone who wants to just for example retweet a new york post story about Hunter Biden. Now that the election is over it doesn’t matter now huh. Twitter is such a scam
— Howdy Doody (@bcampbellhome) December 17, 2020
You just happened to run a radical UX experiment over a presidential election, before reversing it once the electoral college had been determined, right?
— David Boycott (@david_boycott) December 17, 2020
Who needs foreign interference in our elections when we have #Twitter to do it for them?
— Charlton (@charlton_ar) December 17, 2020
“We interfered in the election, doing our best to help @JoeBiden win so…” -Twitter
— King Angry Ostrich (@AngryBeaky) December 17, 2020
We understand your goal was political censorship of views you don’t like. The people should hold you directly responsible for election interference. There are real stories that were and are censored by your platform.
— Austere Nuclear (Peaceful) Scholar (@commanderdata85) December 17, 2020
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:
Is Twitter going to label and remove all of the tweets from democrats and the media saying that we wouldn’t have a vaccine by the end of the year? https://t.co/gccsjOzkka
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) December 16, 2020
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:
The meticulously reported works by Michael Schmidt and Peter Strzok make clear that Trump has succeeded in preventing any real investigation of what Putin has on him and how he became Putin’s useful idiot — a Russian asset in the Oval. Reelecting Trump would put Putin in control.
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) September 23, 2020
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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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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