Message service Twitter will restore the retweet function for posts that may contain fake news or misleading information.
That feature was changed in October to prevent fake news about the US elections from being shared quickly.
For tweets that were labelled as ‘misleading’, a retweet was automatically made into a so-called quote. With this, a user could still share the tweet, with the difference that their own comments could be placed above.
This intervention is now being reversed because the measure did not have the effect that Twitter was hoping for.
The company expected more thoughtful texts to be posted, but it didn’t. Almost half of the quote tweets had only one word of their own, and nearly three-quarters were less than 25 characters.
According to The New York Times, Facebook has also changed the policy that was introduced around the US elections. For example, recognized news sources would no longer be brought up in the algorithm. The social media company itself has not responded to this claim.
