Has the retweet ruined the world? Chris Wetherell, the software developer who built Twitter’s retweet button, thinks so. Introduced in 2009, retweeting transformed the social media landscape, he suggests, by allowing people to pass on information without having bothered to digest it. The result has been “the incentivising of extreme, polarising and outrage-inducing content”. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, is considering adopting “incentives” to “encourage more consideration before spread”.
The debate over the retweet button may seem arcane and geeky. It is, though, a fascinating lens through which to understand many contemporary social issues. It reveals how social anxieties are often played out in debates about technology and how such debates reflect, and exacerbate, broader social prejudices.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/32VnR9R
