Twitter has often been criticised as a haven for oversharing narcissists: now its vainest users have one
more way to love themselves.
The social network switched on the ability for users to retweet their own posts, allowing them to re-share tweets that have already appeared in followers’ timelines.
Thankfully, a user can only retweet themselves once, preventing them from clogging up timelines by repeatedly retweeting the same message.
The update also makes it easier for users to quote-tweet themselves, which allows them to write a tweet with another tweet embedded in it.
Whereas before users would have to painstakingly copy and paste their old tweet’s URL into a new tweet, they can now do so by effortlessly pressing the retweet button and selecting “quote tweet”. What a world we live in.
Twitter announced the update last month, alongside a number of other changes such as removing photos and usernames from the character count, and changing who sees tweets beginning with a username.
The self-retweet function is the first of these changes to be activated.
Twitter has also updated its block feature, which stops blocked users from seeing a person’s tweets and prevents tweets from the blocked user showing up in the blocker’s timeline.
Previously, if a third person would retweet either user, the other person would be able to see it, but the updated block feature closes that loophole.