Tech

Twitter is working on reactions like Facebook's

Soon users might be able to choose from a preselected group of one-icon reactions.

Blonde young female with pleasant appearance looks with terrified expression in smart phone, reads s...
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Serial feature-leaker and reverse engineer, Jane Manchun Wong, has found code that suggests Twitter is working on tweet reactions that would allow users to retweet posts with a predefined selection of emoji, including the 100 percent, no entry, laughing cry face, shocked face, and prayer hands.

Imitation and flattery — Facebook has offered a selection of reactions for years, having initially only offered its now ubiquitous thumbs-up "like" as a one-click interaction tool. Of course, what users really want from Twitter instead of the ability to generate more meaningless content is the option to edit tweets, but CEO Jack Dorsey has time and again said that feature may never appear because of the possibility users would abuse it to get traction on a tweet, only to substantively change its content down the line. Considering how badly all social media users are prone to behaving, that fear isn't exactly unfounded.

Reacting to lies — The larger challenge facing Twitter is getting on top of misinformation, and figuring out how to discipline one of its largest sources of controversial and unverifiable content, the President of the United States, Donald Trump. In recent weeks the platform has taken the unprecedented position of marking some of Trump's wilder tweets with fact-check labels, a move the leader of the free world didn't take kindly to.

Trump has since issued an executive order that, perversely, seeks to restrict the scope of Section 230 of the communications act that, as it stands, absolves social media platforms and similar websites from taking responsibility for the material that users post to their platforms. By trying to increase the punitive scope of Section 230, Trump is actually in conflict with the first amendment, which he's previously been vocal about defending, but if we were to try and hold the president to his former statements and to avoiding espousing contradictions, well, we'd be in for a very fruitless and frustrating time.