In 2015, Twitter introduced the current version of quote tweets, the very worst good thing ever to come to its website, with a simple pitch: “Say more.”
For a long time, the site wasn’t quite accessible to people who didn’t spend their every waking moment on it. Retweets were a jerry-rigged contraption devised by users, accomplished by manually copying the original tweet with “RT” pasted in front of it; dots were entered before messages beginning with usernames to keep them from being minimized into replies. Twitter’s characteristically slow development of its own version of those features—automatic retweets were introduced in 2009, and in 2016 the site started to automatically include tweets beginning with usernames in general feeds—solved two problems. The solutions helped give some form to a site long considered the Wild West of social media, and by standardizing the process, they made Twitter a little more accessible to average users.
Quote tweet was similar, replacing a laborious and unsightly workaround—“Wow, I agree RT @ringer Claire rules,” is a thing I might have tweeted in the olden days—with a slick, easily understood system. Hitting the retweet button at the bottom of every tweet would now bring up a popup with the option to mash Retweet straightaway, or to enter something into the appealingly empty box at the top of the popup: “Add a comment …” Twitter coos.
From there, it all went horribly wrong.
When did things get so bad on Twitter? It’s hard to say, even as nostalgia for the network’s simpler, friendlier days permeates the site. Was it the runup to the 2016 election? The inevitable growth beyond the insidery club of Twitter’s earliest days? The mainstreaming of meme and troll culture? In reality, the shift in discourse from freewheeling internet lab to Room Where Everyone Screams At Everyone owes itself to many things: from the things above to the worldwide SAD plague and rickets hastened by a planet of laptop dens. But quote tweets—a nice, little feature on a nice, little site meant for us to do nice, little things—have had an outsize role in the nastiness.
First, a disclaimer. I like quote tweets and use them frequently: to tell bad jokes and scream about the news and speak possibly nonexistent small smartphones into existence. Our three years of quote-tweet functionality have been three years of better, richer posts—ones with things like context and clarity, which Twitter has, as a rule, sorely lacked. I’ve been a semi-regular user of Twitter since 2009, for better or (usually) worse, and now—with my eyeballs glued to TweetDeck on a daily basis—I appreciate this neat vector of three-dimensional chitchat. At their best, or even at their medium, quote tweets are useful and enjoyable tools.
But when they’re at their worst—heaven help us. There’s plenty of benign badness to go around, like adding a comment just to say “This.” or identify the tweeter’s workplace, or tacking on something better left in a response (“cc @friend @friend2 @friend3”). There were bad, repetitive jokes before the quote tweet, yes, but we are now served up openings on a silver platter. Which is fine. I linked to my own 69 joke (nice, etc.) in the last paragraph—there’s more noise than signal here, maybe, but we’re all just having fun.
Except that we so very often aren’t having fun. The quote tweet is a uniquely agile enabler of anger, and that is where we run into a problem.
Take, for instance, the case of an 18-year-old high school student who last week posted pictures of herself in her prom dress, a Chinese qipao. The images of that student, who is white, promptly went viral over claims of cultural appropriation—achieved, for the most part, by quoting her original tweet with some kind of denunciation. (We are now far enough into the outrage cycle that most of the quote tweets are denunciations of the original denunciations. The whole thing was memorialized in a Twitter Moment—not one composed by Twitter, but still—so take from that what you will.)
There was, of course, ritual shaming on Twitter long before quote tweets: The Justine Sacco saga came two years before the feature existed. But quote tweets turn up the heat and the speed with which the storm travels: Stamp a quick own on the offending tweet and away it goes to all of your followers.
Where retweets carry the veneer of an endorsement, a quote tweet can do so much more—particularly given that Twitter, in its infinite generosity, engineered the format so that the quoted tweet doesn’t count toward the character limit. The result is that you can go long above whatever you don’t like. But it’s often the short tweets that contribute the least. And while you might have tweeted much the same condemnation before 2015—“Wrong RT @ringer Justin Charity is no one’s nemesis”—the official Twitter feature autoloads a card of the quoted tweet, making the interaction that much more visible and the tweet that much easier for you to quote yourself.
Quote tweets also have the effect of dispersing the Bad Tweets far and wide—much farther and wider than they might otherwise have traveled. You might not retweet a presidential tweet if you’re not a supporter—but you sure might quote tweet one you don’t like and caption it accordingly: Really? or Paging Bob Mueller or what have you.
The result is that the ugliest things on Twitter are frequently amplified. Unlike instances of ratio-ing, quote tweets beam the ugliness straight into followers’ feeds. The problem is especially insidious with Twitter’s true merchants of hate, who capitalize on just such a reaction: What more could an aspiring alt-right toad with 1,000 followers hope for than to be huffily fired into thousands upon thousands of additional feeds?
So what are we to do? The answer might be as simple as disobeying Twitter’s original quote tweet instructions. When it comes to digital monsters, the idiots and the bigots and the zealots, do what Twitter wouldn’t want you to: Say less.
