Twitter Retweets Account Aims to Highlight Best Tweets of the Platform

Twitter has launched a new account named @TwitterRetweets aiming to highlight the best of the platform by retweeting the “best tweets” from the new account. @TwitterRetweets account's bio says “Your best Tweets. Retweeted.” This account was launched in November and it has already retweeted several “best tweets”. As a part of Twitter's efforts to highlight the good stuff, the social media company had also recently relaunched its Instagram account where it uploads “screenshots of tweets” it deems good.

Will this fix any of Twitter's problems? Definitely not. But it does give the company a place to highlight the best of Twitter, instead of putting all the focus on the worst, in a way that builds on Twitter's own unique platform features (mainly, the ability to retweet tweets), The Verge reported on Thursday.

Notably, the micro-blogging site has been under fire for harassment, misinformation, and abusive trolls on the platform and it has been struggling to check these activities. Hence, the Twitter Retweets account has to ensure that it doesn't credit copied tweets.

In November, Twitter rolled out hide reply feature globally. Users can "hide" tweeted replies that could be seen as abusive or harassing. Hide replies feature is part of an effort to help users "feel safe and comfortable while talking on Twitter," head of product management Suzanne Xie said in a statement.

At the beginning of the last month, Twitter faced heat from users in India when many of them were seen migrating to Mastodon, an open-source social media platform. It's a decentralised platform, meaning there is no one server or company or person running it. The Twitter users accused Twitter of lacking transparency and accountability, and also of discriminating against Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) users.

December 09, 2019