The Developer Who Made the Retweet Button Believes It Made Twitter Worse

The man who built the retweet function into Twitter made it clear that he regrets it in a new interview with BuzzFeed News. 

Chris Wetherell frequently referred to the retweet (and its ability to spread misinformation and promote bullying) as a weapon in the hands of someone unable to comprehend the damage it could cause.

“We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon,” Wetherell said after noticing an early Twitter pile-on using the tool. “That’s what I think we actually did.”

It can be hard to remember now, but the retweet was once a much more deliberate act. Early Twitter users would manually resubmit each others’ messages, copying the text and writing out RT and the user’s handle. Given that Twitter users were doing this on their own, and using it to affirm posts they agree with, Twitter developers can perhaps be forgiven for being idealistic about building the function into the app itself. Of course, once retweets were made into split-second decisions, users found they could use them to share opinions they don’t agree with and ruthlessly target the original tweeter: a practice known as dunking. 

Wetherell said he first noticed a problem with the function around the same time that many people woke up to the idea that the platform could be used for harmful reasons. Gamergate opened Wetherell’s eyes to the retweet as a weapon.  

“It was very easy for them to brigade reputational harm on someone they didn’t like,” Wetherell said. “Ask any of the people who were targets at that time, retweeting helped them get a false picture of a person out there faster than they could respond. We didn’t build a defense for that. We only built an offensive conduit.”

Wetherell said that the quote retweet, which gives users the ability to quickly attack someone without worry of a counter, made it far too easy to act maliciously. He told BuzzFeed that he worried he’d unearthed some previously unexamined fact about the way people operate.

“It dawned on me that this was not some small subset of people acting aberrantly. This might be how people behave. And that scared me to death,” he said. 

Wetherell isn’t all doom and gloom, however. He thinks that there are ways that Twitter can fix its most toxic feature. He told the outlet that he thinks that the platform could block the retweet function for groups known to spread hate and falsehoods.

“Curation of individuals is way too hard, as YouTube could attest,” Wetherell said. “But curation of audiences is a lot easier.”