Amidst the US elections, Twitter made a host of policy and functional changes. It did so to curb the spread of misleading information. As one of the changes, it revoked the ability to retweet. The retweet option automatically led to quote retweet. However, Twitter has now reversed these changes. It is bringing back the ability to retweet without having to add a quote to it.

The social media giant took to its social platform to announce the latest development. Today, Retweet functionality was restored to the way it was before. Twitter also shared what it learned with its Quote Tweets experiment. The company said that its goal with prompting to Quote instead of retweeting was to encourage more thoughtful amplification. However, this didn’t happen in practice. It shared that while the use of Quote Tweets increased, about 45% of them included single-word affirmations and 70% had less than 25 characters.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1339350335270240256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Moreover, this increase leads to a 20% decrease in sharing through both Retweets and Quote Tweets. “Considering this, we’ll no longer prompt Quote Tweets from the Retweet icon,” wrote Twitter. The company remains focused on encouraging more thoughtful amplification like the feature that reminds people to read articles before they retweet. This feature asks if you’d like to read an article first before retweeting it. If you think reading the article before retweeting it is a good idea, the Twitter app lets you read it in its own web view. You don’t have to go through the hassle of opening a browser app doing the reading part.