Twitter will only allow you to retweet a tweet that contains an article after clicking on that article and reading it.
The social media giants are currently working on the new retweeting feature which will prevent users from sharing what they have not seen or read in an effort to reduce outrage and misinformation.
The new retweet feature will be available for all android users where before retweeting a tweet with an article in it, a pop a message will come up and ask you if you want to click on the link and read the contents first.
According to twitter, the main purpose of this feature is to enhance informed discussions among users while as well as reduce the spread of fake or inappropriate information.
Twitter said in a post “through Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you Tweet it. To help promote informed discussion, we’re testing a new prompt on Android –– when you Retweet an article that you haven’t opened on Twitter, we may ask if you’d like to open it first.”
“It’s easy for links/articles to go viral on Twitter. This can be powerful but sometimes dangerous, especially if people haven’t read the content they’re spreading,” said twitter Product lead Kayvon Beykpour.
However, the new feature will mostly affect new publishers and it would only check to see if a link was opened through Twitter and not anywhere else.
“For this experiment, if you retweet a Tweet that contains an article link, we’ll check if you’ve recently clicked that article link only on Twitter, not elsewhere,” Twitter responded to one user who had asked whether twitter was tracking what people read on the internet or on the app.
It is quite evident that a number of users tend to share or retweet tweets with links without sharing links and it has sometimes spurred outrage and misinformed discussions among twitter users.