Twitter repeals retweet roadblocks, Facebook follows suit

Enlarge / Ever notice that nobody talks about the procedure to replace the glass after the emergency is over? (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

With the worst of a storm of misinformation—and disinformation—about the 2020 US presidential election behind us, both Facebook and Twitter are relaxing some emergency measures put in place to limit its spread.

Twitter brings back one-click retweets

Twitter hoped that making simple retweeting a bit more difficult would encourage more thoughtful conversation. The idea did not work out in practice as pictured in the initial announcement here. (credit: Jim Salter)

The most obvious changes taking place are on Twitter, which is getting rid of a measure it put in place in October to encourage quote tweeting (QT) instead of simple retweeting (RT). The intent was to encourage users to add thoughtful commentary and perhaps to actually read original content prior to amplifying it based on a headline alone.

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 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.

Twitter verification is coming back in 2021

The company is also relaunching its somewhat-controversial verification process—the measure by which one gets a blue checkmark next to one's username on each tweet. The company put the verification process on hold in November 2017, acknowledging issues with perception of verified accounts as endorsed by Twitter. Since then, already-verified accounts have kept the blue check, but few if any new accounts—even those meeting earlier criteria for verification—have been accepted.

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