After years of criticism about the ways it fuels anxiety and perpetuates misinformation — Twitter seems like it’s trying to make its platform a better place.

In the last few weeks, it’s rolled out some new features, including the ability to see quote tweets under the retweets section, Fleets (like Instagram Stories), and warning labels for tweets with possible misinformation.

On Wednesday, Twitter announced its latest experiment: it will start asking (just Android, for now) users to open the link to an article they’re about to retweet if they haven’t read it already.

Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you Tweet it.

To help promote informed discussion, we're testing a new prompt on Android –– when you Retweet an article that you haven't opened on Twitter, we may ask if you'd like to open it first.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 10, 2020

Did you read the article you’re about to spread? https://t.co/bUsvprod5C

— jack (@jack) June 10, 2020

In answering questions from users, Twitter Support said it’s only experimenting with links from news publishers and it would only check to see if a link was opened through Twitter. So in theory, if you had read the story in Safari, and later opened the same story on Twitter, it would still trigger the prompt.

For this experiment, if you Retweet a Tweet that contains an article link, we’ll check if you've recently clicked that article link only on Twitter, not elsewhere.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 10, 2020

Checking if someone has read an article before sharing it addresses a problem we’ve known about for a few years: they don’t. From the Washington Post in 2016:

According to a new study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, 59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked: In other words, most people appear to retweet news without ever reading it.

Worse, the study finds that these sort of blind peer-to-peer shares are really important in determining what news gets circulated and what just fades off the public radar. So your thoughtless retweets, and those of your friends, are actually shaping our shared political and cultural agendas.

“People are more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”

This isn’t the first time companies have tried to solve this problem. In 2017, we wrote about NRKbeta, the tech vertical of the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, which introduced a multiple choice quiz on certain stories. Readers had to answer the questions to be able to post a comment.

But the Twitter feature still raises some security questions.

So this represents a fun set of assumptions.

1. You do all your reading based on things you click on Twitter

2. Twitter tracks every single article you click on and records the full URL against your profile.

3. Retweeting unread links is very commonhttps://t.co/scW20WShLE

— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) June 10, 2020

Also: if you're a journalist who sends links to people on Twitter… say your sources via DM, & Twitter were to obey a subpoena on you & your suspected sources, to deliver your data, including link resolution, law enforcement could potentially join 2 user accounts together also.

— Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope) June 10, 2020

This will likely reduce engagement rates while potentially improving quality so it's doubly commendable that Twitter is experimenting https://t.co/R5vjW8rgL1

— Alexios (@Mantzarlis) June 10, 2020

More friction. Worth trying?

Does someone know of studies of what % of links shared are actually clicked first? https://t.co/dYPTvo98EM

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) June 10, 2020