The popular social media giant, Twitter may introduce a new ‘clarification’ feature for tweets. The company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey said this feature will allow users to include additional context to ‘old tweets’.
According to Jack Dorsey, the major reason why this feature is being introduced is to accommodate those Twitter users who want to slightly tweak their old tweets by providing context which may affect their career in an era of increasing political correctness. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs’ Internet and Technology conference in San Francisco, Dorsey said this feature will make users feel more safe about their tweeting.
“The other thing that we’re seeing more broadly within the culture right now in this particular moment is people quote-unquote ‘being canceled’ because of past things that they’ve said on Twitter or various other places in social media,” Dorsey explained to the audience on Thursday.
Dorsey said that Twitter was thinking about adding this feature but then it hasn’t been finalized yet. However, Twitter already sort of lets users add context to their tweet via the ‘re-tweet’ option but what the CEO announced sounds different.
“You would be able to retweet the clarification, so it always carries around with it that context. That’s one approach. Not saying that we are going to launch that but those are the sorts of questions we are going to ask.” he said.
Dorsey’s recent announcement about the new Twitter feature comes after a number of high profile personalities have been embarrassed on account of their old tweets. For instance, Kevin Heart’s homophobic tweet in 2010 landed him in hot waters, as social media bashed the famous Hollywood actor for his eight-year-old comments. The bashing increased to such an extent that the actor withdrew from hosting the Oscars. Similarly, another famous personality, filmmaker James Gunn was pulled off from Guardians of Galaxy over his old tweets.
So in light of such events, Jack Dorsey’s comments make much more sense since Twitter has become a graveyard for those celebrities who made ignorant tweets in the past. Dorsey further mentioned that these old tweets could potentially ruin people’s career which highlights the existence of ‘Internet permanency’ meaning whatever you’ve written or shared on the Internet can never be removed.
