Twitter appears to be working on reminding people that interesting tweets are something you should click, download, and view while logged into the company’s ad-funded service, not just see on a screenshot. This is why some users see the Share Tweet? popup whenever the Twitter app notices they are taking a screenshot.
Social media analyst Matt Navarra noted two kinds of tweet hints: “Copy link”and “Share tweet”. TechCrunch noted that some of its employees were invited and pointed to another tweet, in which Twitter provided “Copy Link”and “Share Tweet”buttons.
As I wrote this, I checked my own Twitter app, took a screenshot of the tweet, and got the “Copy Link”version. There is no “dismiss”option, but the pop-up disappears after about seven seconds.
Other Ars employees have seen “Share Tweet”and double versions of this prompt.
Twitter makes money when people visit a site in a browser or download it in official Twitter apps and then see sponsored tweets or pre-ads in native videos (users can also sign up for a Twitter Blue subscription). Screenshots posted directly or on competing social platforms do not generate revenue. Engaging with Twitter itself can encourage people to sign up and do more.
Twitter reported 237.8 million “average monetizable daily active users”in the second quarter of 2022, up 16.6% from the same quarter in 2021. The company claims that this increase was driven by “continuous product improvements”and a “global discussion of current events.”It’s understandable why Twitter, a corporate entity, prefers links to tweets over screenshots, enough for A/B/C testing of a clue that can make users feel like the Twitter app is watching them closely and scolding them.
But for Twitter, a cultural entity, screenshots are extremely valuable, probably even more than the links themselves. If you’ve been into internet culture for years, you’ll understand why.
Former President Donald Trump has used Twitter as his primary means of posting news, announcing policies and, on occasion, leaving himself open to legislative and judicial action. After the January 6 uprising, Donald Trump (or his social team) deleted three tweets, leading to him being blocked from Twitter in the middle of the night. After Trump’s Twitter account was suspended “due to the risk of further incitement to violence”, all of Trump’s tweets were effectively deleted. Archives exist, but links to everything the president, tuned to Twitter, had to say on the platform, and the embedded versions of those tweets no longer work.
Screenshots also provide context that cannot be captured by a link. Tweets with notable likes, retweets, quote-tweets or replies and numbers can be captured in a moment with a screenshot, as seen in tweets that have been “proportioned”or in seemingly trite statements that attract incredible numbers. A reply to a tweet can provide important context, something you can’t be sure of will appear if you link to a reply tweet or if another tweet in the thread is changed or deleted.
And while the Twitter edit button currently shows the revision history of the edited tweet, it can be important to see the original tweet with replies to it at the time to capture its impact and context.
All of this points to a big problem: Twitter may not last forever. And Internet services with user-generated content that can be embedded on websites have a history of disappearing and exporting their inoperability to pages that touched them.
This phenomenon is known as link rot. If you’ve seen a news story that uses deleted tweets as an important piece of evidence or discussion, you’ve seen link rot. Before Twitter hosted its own images, many users relied on third-party services to host them. Twitpic closed but was bought by Twitter and its archives have been restored. Yfrog was also not successful, and its parent company ImageShack used embedded image space in tweets and other sites to insert unrelated ads. Another service, Vidme, eventually forced “5 Star HD Porn” onto sites that relied on their embedded media, including The Washington Post.
When Twitter asks users to rely on their servers instead of finding a home for an image file, the service is assuming that its servers and business are more important than the context you might be trying to capture. For some tweets, this may be an easy compromise, and it may just indicate something that users didn’t notice before. But Twitter should remember that there are very good reasons, even historical ones, to ignore the buy-in and grab what you see.