Twitter Fights Screenshots with Pop-Up Prompts

We all have seen tweets shared as screenshots on other platforms. While it’s an efficient method to deliver the message to those not on Twitter, this doesn’t leave a place for the source of it to be interacted with. To decrease this practice, Twitter is testing some methods to dissuade its users to screenshot tweets.

This feature means that when you try to take a screenshot on the Twitter app for Android or iOS, the app shows you a message that offers you alternative ways to share it. As it suggests, you can either share the link to the original tweet (on other social media as well) or copy the link and share it elsewhere. This doesn’t prevent you from taking screenshots but offers other ways of sharing.

This well fits the recent trends when Twitter seeks to maximize real user engagement. Being accused of having too many bots on the platform, Twitter cannot just put up with the fact that so much content generated on the platform is just published without generating any user engagement there. These prompts are meant to minimize Twitterless sharing and foster sharing the origin instead. And the scale of this trend is easy to imagine when you visit a popular site like KnowYourMeme and see how many of these memes are actually screenshots from Twitter.

Making screenshots may have other purposes: for example, to prove somebody wrong or right long after the tweet was posted, sharing the screenshot in the thread instead or (or in addition to) the link to the original that may be harder to find. Yet if this is your aim, you will do it anyway. And if you just want to screenshot the tweet for further sharing elsewhere, you may think twice after seeing such a prompt.

Have you ever made a screenshot to share some tweet instead of sharing the link to the original? And probably you’ve seen a lot of this stuff on Instagram or Facebook, haven’t you? Will this help Twitter to enlarge its user base? Share your thoughts about it in the comments section!