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July 24, 2019 04:45 pm

Guy Who Built Twitter's Retweet Button Admits Maybe That Was a Really Bad Idea

The man behind Twitter's "Retweet" button -- which is pretty much the foundation of the whole site -- now thinks he screwed up big time, telling BuzzFeed News in an interview that he recalled thinking, "We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon." From a report: "That's what I think we actually did," added Chris Wetherell, the developer in question. Wetherell, who helped build the now-defunct Google Reader platform before he joined Twitter in 2009, told BuzzFeed that at the time, adding the function seemed like a simple way to streamline the process of spreading another tweet. Before the retweet button, users had to manually copy other tweets. According to BuzzFeed, Wetherell said that Twitter staff working on the feature in 2009 were more concerned about its utility in situations like "earthquakes" and fully unprepared for how it would change engagement on the platform: "Only two or three times did someone ask a broader and more interesting social question, which was, 'What is getting shared?'" Wetherell said. "That almost never came up." After the retweet button debuted, Wetherell was struck by how effectively it spread information. "It did a lot of what it was designed to do," he said. "It had a force multiplier that other things didn't have."... "We would talk about earthquakes," Wetherell said. "We talked about these first response situations that were always a positive and showed where humanity was in its best light."

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