Twitter introduced a new feature Wednesday that prompts users to read links to articles before sharing them. When users try to post links without opening them, a message appears, saying “Headlines don’t tell the full story, want to read this before Retweeting?” Limited to only Android users for now, the new feature is part of a series of overhauls, including fact-checking tweets from President Trump, the company is making to support “healthy conversations.”
“It’s easy for links/articles to go viral on Twitter,” product lead Kayvon Beykpour tweeted alongside the announcement. “This can be powerful but sometimes dangerous, especially if people haven’t read the content they’re spreading.”
But making the feature work requires a level of tracking, and risk, that users likely aren’t aware of. Aram Zucker-Scharff, an ad tech engineer, detailed in a Twitter thread that the platform now keeps tabs on all the links users click, complete with a URL and a timestamp.
Twitter seemingly expanded the amount of data it collects from users to include the links in tweets that were opened, the tweet that included the links, and when it was opened. Zucker-Scharff noted that the link-tracking appears to have begun last month; he said the file containing the history of links on which he had clicked did not appear the last time he examined Twitter’s code in 2018.
