Twitter Wants To Stop Pile-Ons With A 'Clarification' Button. Here's How It Would Work
Twitter's internal ecosystem functions on the assumption that at some point in the next 48 hours, someone somewhere is going to get ruthlessly dunked upon for something they either said and forgot about or said without thinking. You're labelled a prat, and that's the game.
The era of runaway pile-ons might be coming to an end, though. Speaking at a Goldman Sachs event in San Francisco last week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said one of the new approaches the site is thinking of taking is to give users in the middle of a pile-on the chance to add some context or an apology.
"The other thing that we're seeing more broadly within the culture right now in this particular moment is people quote-unquote 'being cancelled' because of past things that they've said on Twitter or various other places in social media," Recode reported Dorsey as saying. "There’s no credible way to kind of go back and clarify or even have a conversation to show the learning and the transition since."
So what would it look like? Dorsey explained that the original tweet would be basically clamped in place with the new explanatory footnote, and couldn't be retweeted without the context that had been added. The function would "enable people to quickly go back or to any tweet, whether it be years back or today, and show that original tweet - kind of like a quote retweet, a retweet with comment - and to add some context and some colour on what they might have tweeted or what they might have meant.
"By doing so you might imagine that the original tweet then would not have the sort of engagement around it. Like, you wouldn’t be able to retweet the original tweet, for instance. You would just show the clarification, you would be able to retweet the clarification, so it always carries around with it that context. That’s one approach."
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