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Making Social Media The Same Across All Platforms
We've written before about how Twitter's roll-out of the retweet (which saw troll armies emerge ala Gamergate) directly caused Facebook to create their mobile share button in its Newsfeed, and boy, what a garbage fire that was. The latest synchronization of the Social Media of Things seems to be Stories, a feature you might either know from Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, or even LinkedIn, that recently rolled out on Twitter as Fleets. The idea behind Fleets is to provide users who do not like their tweets out in the open to have a bit more privacy in circulating whatever it is they want to on their Twitter platform.Â
The problem with Twitter, though, is not its public nature but its abusive culture. Anyone, at any time, can be a target of harassment on the platform, and it's doubtful that Fleets will stop this from happening. Any rando who can see your Twitter profile can automatically see your Fleets, and while normal tweets have comments, you can only respond to a Fleet through DM -- which is arguably a bit too private for some, especially women. And while these Fleeting tweets only last 24 hours, screenshots exist. Oh, and you don't get a notification when your tweets are shared in someone else's Fleet, which on a platform like Twitter can easily mean groups can privately planning harassment campaigns against their targets.
Moderating these Stories features across every other platform has also proven to be way more difficult, what with the whole 24-hour window period, and it's not like Twitter can do with any less of that. The point is that, just like Facebook wasn't the right platform to unleash the share button (from a privacy and a socially conscious point of view), adding Fleets to Twitter is an equally questionable move.