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Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
The medium and the message: Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
The medium and the message: Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

How to get Twitter back on song? #NoMoreRetweets

This article is more than 6 years old
John Naughton
They make up a quarter of all tweets, but at long last someone has found a way to turn them off…

When Twitter first broke cover in July 2006, the initial reaction in the non-geek community was derisive incredulity. First of all, there was the ludicrous idea of a “tweet” – not to mention the metaphor of “twittering”, which, after all, is what small birds do. Besides, what could one usefully say in 140 characters? To the average retired colonel (AKA Daily Telegraph reader), Twitter summed up the bird-brained frivolity of the internet era, providing further evidence that the world was going to the dogs.

And now? It turns out that the aforementioned colonel might have been right. For one of the things you can do with a tweet is declare nuclear war. Another thing you can do with Twitter is to bypass the mainstream media, ignore the opinion polls, spread lies and fake news without let or hindrance and get yourself elected president of the United States.

How did it come to this? When it first appeared, Twitter seemed such a smart idea. You could decide who was interesting and worth following and, in a sense, plug into their thought-streams. As the writer Kathryn Schulz put it in 2013: “Collectively, the people I follow on Twitter – book nerds, science nerds, journalists, the uncategorisably interesting – come pretty close to my dream community.”

And because no reciprocity was involved – if someone decided to follow you, you had no obligation to follow them also – Twitter enabled low-commitment transactions, which is one reason why it initially spread so rapidly. And later, as organisations, companies and governments cottoned on to it and started to use it as a way of putting out information, Twitter became a kind of wire service for everyone. All of which was good.

Yet it went from that to what it is now: a firehose from bedlam, an amplifier of every kind of human frailty and malice as well as a channel for “bots”, automated or semi-automated scripts designed to pump out propaganda. And the maddening thing is that, despite all that, conscientious journalists have to keep up with it just in case they miss a vital bit of breaking news.

Where did Twitter go wrong? The answer, according to Alexis Madrigal, a perceptive observer of these things, lies in a decision made by the company’s executives in 2009 to introduce a “retweet” button. This enabled users effortlessly to rebroadcast to their followers a tweet that seemed to them striking, outrageous, funny, annoying or otherwise noteworthy.

Previously, they could have achieved the same effect via a laborious cut-and-paste operation, but the new button reduced to zero the transaction costs of rebroadcasting, which meant that you didn’t have to waste valuable time thinking about whether or not to retweet.

And guess what? That’s exactly what happened. Which is why my Twitter feed is full of anguished liberals retweeting the latest stupid thing that Trump has tweeted or being outraged by the manipulative hypocrisy of Facebook or humblebragging about their latest book/article/speech by retweeting nice things that the publicist posted on Facebook.

In the end, this torrent of idiocy and self-indulgence gets to one, which is why I have morphed from being someone who always monitored Twitter into someone who only occasionally checks it.

This is self-defeating, of course, because it means I’m also missing out on the good stuff that is still buried in the torrent of trash. Madrigal had similar thoughts. “I felt the same urge,” he writes, “but I wanted to do something less extreme, something that would allow me to keep the baby, even as I drained the bathwater. So I began to take note each time I experienced a little hit of outrage or condescension or envy during a Twitter session. What I found was that nearly every time I felt one of these negative emotions, it was triggered by a retweet.”

Having diagnosed the problem, he then found a solution, provided by a geeky colleague who wrote him some code that turns off all the retweets in his Twitter feed. (Retweets make up more than a quarter of all tweets.) “When they disappeared,” Madrigal reports, “my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times. Less breathlessness. And more of what the people I follow were actually thinking about, reading and doing. It’s still not perfect, but it’s much better.”

That sounds good to me. I’d like one of those. So I’m now boning up on the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in which the metadata of a tweet is expressed. Somewhere in there is the “retweet” attribute that I have to find and act upon. I may be gone for some time. In the meanwhile, please think before you retweet.

What I’m reading

John Naughton’s recommendations

When carrying a gun makes people feel safe
Unusual essay in the Atlantic by a man who carries a gun, explaining how his fellow gun-owners see the world, followed by fierce pushback from furious readers. Makes me glad I don’t live in the US.

Reasons for Amazon’s chaotic warehouses
Intriguing essay explaining why classic librarianship principles about filing things in an orderly fashion don’t work at Amazon’s scale. Hint: you don’t have to be tidy if you have enough computing power.

Why Christian evangelists felt able to vote for Trump
Fascinating account by sociologist Francesca Tripodi of what she learned from watching American evangelist groups doing Bible reading.

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