Twitter knows you’ve taken a screenshot and instead asks you to share it

Twitter appears to be working to remind people that interesting tweets should be clicked, loaded, and viewed while logged into the company’s ad-supported service, not just in a screenshot. Because of this, some users see a “Share a tweet?” Pop-up when the Twitter app notices you’re taking a screenshot.

Social media analyst Matt Navarra noted the two types of nudge prompts in a tweet: “Copy link” and “Share tweet”. TechCrunch noted that some of its employees had received the prompt and pointed it out another tweet in which Twitter provided both the “Copy Link” and “Share Tweet” buttons.

As I was writing this, I checked my own Twitter app, took a screenshot of a tweet and got the copy link version. There is no “Close” option, but the popup will disappear after about seven seconds.

Other Ars employees have seen the “tweet share” and double-stacked versions of this prompt.

Twitter makes money when people visit the site in a browser or load it in the official Twitter apps, and then see sponsored tweets or pre-roll ads on native videos (users can also sign up for a Twitter Blue subscription). Screenshots, whether shared directly or on competing social platforms, do not generate revenue. Interacting with Twitter itself could encourage people to sign up and do more of the same.

Twitter reported 237.8 million “average monetizable daily active usage” in the second quarter of 2022, an increase of 16.6 percent compared to the same quarter in 2021. The company claims this increase was due to “ongoing product improvements” and “global conversations about current events” prefers tweet links to screenshots, enough to be able to A/B/C test a prompt that can make users feel like the Twitter app is both watching them closely and berating them.

But for Twitter, the cultural entity, screenshots are tremendously valuable, probably more so than links alone. If you’ve studied internet culture for years, you’ll know why.

Former President Donald Trump used Twitter as his primary vehicle to break news, announce policies, and occasionally open himself to legislative and judicial action. After the Jan. 6 riot, Trump (or his social team) deleted three tweets that led to his suspension from Twitter in the middle of the night. After Trump’s Twitter account was suspended “due to the risk of further inciting violence,” virtually all of Trump’s tweets were deleted. There are archives, but links to everything the Twitter-leaning president had to say on the platform and embedded versions of those tweets no longer work.

Screenshots also provide context that a link cannot capture. Tweets with notable like, retweet, quote-tweet, or reply activity and counts can be captured in the moment with a screenshot, as seen in tweets that have been “voted” or seemingly mundane statements that are moving in incredible numbers. A reply to a tweet can provide important context, something you can’t be sure will show up when you link the reply tweet or when another tweet in the thread is modified or deleted.

And while Twitter’s edit button currently shows the revision history of an edited tweet, it can be important to see an original tweet and its replies at that point in time to understand its impact and context.

All of this points to the bigger problem: Twitter may not exist forever. And internet services with user content that can be embedded in websites have gone in the past, exporting their brokenness to the pages they touched.

This phenomenon is known as link rot. If you’ve seen a message that uses since-deleted tweets as a crucial piece of evidence or discussion, you’ve seen Link Rot. Before Twitter hosted its own images, many users relied on third-party services to host them. Twitpic was shut down but bought by Twitter and its archives restored. Yfrog didn’t make it either, and its parent company, ImageShack, used the embedded image space in tweets and other websites to insert unrelated ads. Another service, Vidme, has finally planted “5-star HD porn” on sites that rely on its embedded media, including The Washington Post.

When Twitter asks users to rely on their servers rather than finding a home for an image file, the service is suggesting that its servers and business are more important than the context you might be trying to capture. For some tweets, that can be an easy trade-off, and it might just indicate something that users didn’t notice before. But Twitter should remember that there are very good, even historical, reasons to ignore buy-ins and grab what you see.