Cross-posting stuff on social networking sites has become somewhat of a contemporary annoyance. If you have accounts on the majority of the well-known platforms, you’ll see how viral trends spread and recur on each of them. t. YouTube has implemented efforts to deter users from cross-posting to Instagram and TikTok. Since it now recognizes people taking screenshots of tweets, Twitter appears to be following suit and asking them to share the tweets they are seeing.
Twitter screenshots are posted on Reddit, Instagram, and a variety of other websites. When users attempt to capture a screenshot, Twitter has started to show pop-ups that offer other, in-app activities they might want to consider. TechCrunch cites several instances of pop-up windows including buttons to copy the link to the tweet, share the tweet, or do both. There may be testing on Android even though we’ve only seen these so far on the iOS version of the app. We examine some of these prompts’ appearances with the help of app analyst Jane Manchun Wong and social media strategist Matt Navarra.
Sharing tweets as screenshots distorts Twitter engagement numbers for content producers, underestimating the true audience size of their work. Since it cannot monetise screenshot views once they are posted on another social media site, Twitter is probably just interested in itself.
We’ll agree that Twitter should be commended for employing a pop-up rather than attempting to completely prohibit screenshots in order to deter this activity. Some devoted Twitter users argue that watermarking app screenshots in the same way TikTok watermarks videos would be a good compromise. That would not address Twitter’s core issue, but at least it would serve to remind the viewer of the source of the post.
WhatsApp also launched a screenshot ban for view-once media, although it was mostly done for privacy reasons. It’s impossible to predict where Twitter will take this in the end, but for the moment it appears to be an A/B test.
