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How to retweet using Twitter’s new temporary format

How to retweet using Twitter’s new temporary format

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The changes will be in place until ‘at least’ the end of election week

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A picture of the Twitter logo.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is temporarily changing how you retweet ahead of the November 3rd US presidential election, to help prevent abuse and the spread of misinformation. Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to retweet. But until at least the end of election week, it won’t be quite as easy as usual to retweet something to all of your followers.

Starting today, when you click or tap the retweet icon, Twitter will pull up the Quote Tweet composer to encourage you to write something about that tweet before you share it. You don’t have to write anything if you don’t want — just leave the composer blank and hit the retweet button to retweet like you normally would. But Twitter is hoping that by introducing some friction into the process, people might better consider exactly what they’re retweeting or take the opportunity to add their own perspective.

Here’s what the new retweet workflow will look like:

The changes to retweets aren’t the only differences you might see to your Twitter experience today. Twitter also won’t show “liked by” or “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow, and the trends box will only show trends with included additional context. Like the changes to retweets, these tweaks will be in place from today until at least the end of election week in the US, according to Twitter. All of these changes were first announced on October 9th.

Update October 21st, 4:08PM ET: Updated headline to reflect the “how to” nature of this article.