Another day, another Twitter test. This time Twitter has been reported to be experimenting a way to show tweets to users from accounts that they don’t follow, but that their friends follow.
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The experiment was first spotted by Twitter user @aleefbaypay who spotted a tweet from BuzzFeed on his timeline. Problem, he does not follow @BuzzFeed, but his friend does.
WTF @twitter, why am I seeing tweets from accounts that I don’t follow but are followed by someone whom I follow?
— aleefbaypay (@aleefbaypay) August 3, 2014
@EliLanger yup. The buzzfeed tweet is the one in question. pic.twitter.com/FTbHTXs2Z9
— aleefbaypay (@aleefbaypay) August 3, 2014
One can easily see how this test could be easily be an experiment on a new monetisation channel for Twitter, very similar to Facebook’s sponsored stories.
But if Twitter did implement this feature, it would probably meet the anger of users. Following an account on Twitter is a deliberate action, people decide whose tweet and retweets they want to see in their timeline. They will not easily accept seeing tweets they did not ask for, especially in a timeline which already gets easily cluttered.
Twitter tests features features like that all the time, most of them never make it to the confirmation stage. However, we can really see where Twitter is going with this.
We reached out to Twitter in the UK for more information, but no one responded.
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