Looks like we need to set down some rules, fellow tweeters. It’s been discussed before, but let’s expand given how the world has changed, native retweet has been introduced, and Twitter’s become an ethical minefield.
Twitter launched, and survived for a long time, without a native retweet mechanic. People soon discovered that the problem of sharing something another posted was a common one, and solved it through inventing what we now know as ‘the retweet’: RT prefixed the username, and then the statement. It was a simple, easy system to start promoting others, but soon we came to people retweeting retweets. This was mainly a client issue: the power-users (inevitably those who had the most to gain from Twitter) used the retweet button inside their client to prefix RT once more. We ended up with tweets that looked like this…
