Twitter is a cool technology tool, but it has a lot of bad things. One of those bad things is the ease with which one can spread misinformation.
Twitter should build in source links as a native feature to tweets to help promote better sourcing and reduce the viral spread of fake news.
Twitter should build in source links as a native feature to tweets to help promote better sourcing and reduce the viral spread of fake news.
Right now there are many interesting images, quotes, infographics, etc that spread virally and people just retweet them without checking if the information is valid. Mainly, it’s normally not even possible to verify for yourself if the information is valid. Say you find an graph with an appealing insight? Is it true? Hard to know. It’s much easier to just click retweet.
Twitter could add an easy way for people to provide sources and also bubble tweets that are sourced higher up.
For example, I found an interesting stat from Pew Research that 74% globally have no confidence in Trump in international matters. Normally I could just screenshot and share. But then it’s not possible for someone to easily find the source of the data. Instead I should be able to compose the tweet and as a separate field that doesn’t count against the character limit include the source.
Here’s a mock up of what this feature could look like — just add some source link icon for tweets that include sources.
The actual tweet … I need to remember to add the source, and almost no one adds a source.
It’s too much work to ask people to share the sources for interesting threads or graphs. It should be built in as a native feature.
What do you think? Should twitter add sources as a native feature of tweets? Reply to this post or on twitter. I think it’s a must-build feature.
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