"I gave a gun to a child," he says, repented, the creator of the button for retweet

In the program of Chris Wetherell there is a remarkable job: his time on Twitter and the retweet button creation. But this fact does not make him proud.

In an interview that publishes Buzzfeed News, the developer showed sorry for the function that he created with a work team in 2009. "We deliver a loaded gun to a four-year-old child"he said. The chronology is more or less precise: the social network of the bird appeared at the beginning of 2006.

For the naive, the retention button allows you to replicate the message of another user without the need to copy and paste, as well as automatically include the source.

Wetherell, who is preparing to launch a start-upHe added that he had created the function with good intentions, especially so that users with more subscribers could give visibility to other tweeters. But this process with some degree of automation is part of the degradation of social networks.

According to the developer, without having to transcribe the message, or even do copy pastecauses the reflection (although minimal) is supplanted by the impulse. And this overwhelms Twitter with messages that – perhaps – should not gain visibility.

"By copying and sticking, people saw and thought what they shared, at least a moment. When the retention button started, this friction decreased. The impulse has supplanted the minimum of reflection once it has become something shared. Before the recovery, Twitter was largely a nice place. After all hell is unleashed and has spread, Says Wetherell.

After the former employee of Twitter, this feature, which in turn, has adopted other platforms, such as Facebook, is partly causing undesirable phenomena on social networks, such as false news.

It should be noted that after the publication of the interview in buzzfeedChris Wetherell (who has a privileged username on Twitter, @cw, is only possible to be at the beginning of this network) commented that he was not the only creator of touch-upswhich was a team effort, responding to a request from the company where I worked.

Who is the solution?

The CEO of Twitter himself, Jack Dorsey, is aware of the problematic nature of retaliation. In fact, the social network that, some time ago, had doubled its original 140 characters is now looking for ways to improve your conversations.

One of the pushing movements is the contextualization of retweets. What does this imply? In 2015, they added the ability to make comments during the retweet and, for a few weeks, multimedia content can also be added by replicating the message of another user.

In line with the mea culpa of repentant developerthese additional steps would add a reflection time – even a few seconds – before touching a button and broadcasting a message.

Jason Goldman, product manager on Twitter when Wetherell developed the software infamous functioncoincided with him pointing out that the return is one of the main problems of this platform.

Against that, there are good ideas. For example, that those Users identified for republishing offensive tweets and / or false news are fined with temporary deletion of the feature..

Professor David Rand of MIT, specializing in the study of false news, shared another possible solution. What You can only retweet an article if the tweeter has clicked on the link.. "It could help people understand the problem of content sharing without having read it," he said.