In the midst of the Elon Musk buyout saga, Twitter has been working on a number of new features including one that tracks how many times an account tweets per month.
Reverse engineers spotted the tweet counter in development about a month ago and it looks like it’s progressed to the testing phase.
On Monday, some Twitter users shared screenshots that showed a new line appearing on Twitter accounts displaying how many tweets had been shared in a month by that account.
‘This is part of an ongoing experiment in which we want to learn how providing more context about the frequency of an account’s Tweets can help people make more informed decisions about the accounts they choose to engage with,’ a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch.
It could also be a stamp of authenticity to tell apart bots and troll accounts that could generate a massive number of tweets a month.
Bots have been a particular pain in the side for the social media giant by making it hard to quantify the number of authentic daily users.
It was also the reason why Musk said he was terminating his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, citing that the company had not provided him with the relevant information on the number of bots.
On Twitter, bots are automated accounts that can do the same things as actual humans – send tweets, follow users, like things and retweet other posts.
#Twitter is working to show how many tweets you make per month. pic.twitter.com/H4DukXCHNJ
Spam bots are are used for deceptive, annoying or harmful purposes like spreading fake news, pretending to be genuine humans, driving traffic to a specific website or run fake giveaways and financial scams.
A tweet counter could possibly help differentiate a real account from a fake one.
For now, the general reaction to this feature seems to be shock at how much people tweet.
According to a 2021 study by Pew Research Centre, 25% of US adult Twitter users account for 97% of all tweets in the country. This means that around a quarter of Twitter’s user base accounts for nearly 100% of the platform’s content.
The total number of Twitter users in the UK was estimated to be 19.05 million as of October 2021.
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