Back in October, before the US election, Twitter implemented a change that it hoped would encourage more thoughtful sharing.

One of those changes was prompting users to quote a tweet and add their own commentary rather than simply retweeting something.

“Though this adds some extra friction for those who simply want to Retweet, we hope it will encourage everyone to not only consider why they are amplifying a Tweet, but also increase the likelihood that people add their own thoughts, reactions and perspectives to the conversation,” Twitter explained in October.

This afternoon Twitter provided an update regarding this change and it more miss than hit.

Twitter reports that this change simply discouraged folks from retweeting at all with the firm reporting a decrease of 20 percent for both Quote Tweets and Retweets. Individually there was a 23 percent decrease in retweets and a 26 percent increase in Quote tweets.

As Twitter described it, this did slow the spread of misinformation if only by virtue of the fact that there was an overall decrease in sharing on the platform.

Worse still, the desired effect where folks would add commentary did not seem to happen.

“We observed that prompting Quote Tweets didn’t appear to increase context: 45 percent of additional Quote Tweets included just a single word and 70 percent contained less than 25 characters,” Twitter said.

As a result the way users retweeted content before mid-October will be re-enabled.

[Source – Twitter]