Twitter is a great source of information providing you’re getting all of the right information. Good for some sources, but not for others is the fact that many users will simply hit the retweet button based on a headline. Twitter is looking at potentially making some changes to their system to — at least try to — prevent this and the spread of #FakeNews.
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.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 10, 2020
Of course, there is no way for Twitter to know if you’ve read the article once you open it…
But that isn’t really the point of the feature. This additional safeguard from Twitter follows other major platforms like Facebook adding checks on news and warnings about the source, Whatsapp minimising the number of forwards you can make and visual notification on the source of a message.
There is no specific indication at the moment if this is for web-based access, THE Official Twitter app or both. It will be interesting to see how the change affects Twitter feeds if it becomes a standard feature.
An obvious problem I see is dealing with paywalled articles.
more steps to improve the quality of discussion? initially sounds good to me