Twitter is testing another feature again. This time, it’s one that not so much discourages screenshots of tweets, but encourages sharing it instead. An understandable position, but at the same time, it should be obvious why someone would rather take screenshots instead.
App reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong shared that Twitter knows when you’re taking a screenshot of a tweet, and nudges you towards sharing it instead. When the taking of a screenshot is detected, the bird app displays a popup that reads “Share Tweet instead?” with two buttons. One reads “Copy link” while the other says “Share Tweet”. What they do should be self explanatory.
Twitter is trying to persuade me to Share Tweet or Copy Link instead of taking a screenshot of the Tweet pic.twitter.com/vwFYNsf003
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) October 6, 2022
The Verge cites a statement by Twitter spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo that the prompt is indeed a test, and only for a small group of iOS users. And the reasoning behind the test is simply to get more users to use the bird app. After all, screenshots end up all over the place, not just Twitter. And for those what end up on other social media sites, those end up being engagement numbers that the microblogging site is not getting. Adding on to that is the fact that looking for the tweet itself after you’ve seen it yourself takes more steps than just hitting the the shared tweet.
All that being said though, there are times where, on the user side of things, it just makes sense to take screenshots rather than sharing. Social media posts of all kinds, on Twitter or elsewhere, can go missing, either due to its removal by the original poster, platform admins, or just a bug in the matrix. If it’s the latter, a screenshot preserves it from unintended deletion.
At any rate, this is another move by Twitter to get more users on board. Since it makes money via ads, this is far from unexpected.
(Source: Jane Manchun Wong / Twitter via The Verge)
