Man who invented Twitter’s retweet button says feature is ‘like giving a four-year-old child a loaded gun’ and wishes he’d never come up with it

• Chris Wetherell said he thought tool would help underrepresented communities
• Now believes retweeting helps misinformation spread and amplifies outrage
• First realised negatives of button during campaign against female gamers 

Developer Chris Wetherell, who invented Twitter’s retweet button, has said the feature is like giving a four-year-old child a loaded gun and that he wishes he’d never come up with it

The inventor behind the retweeting button on Twitter has said he regrets creating it and compared the feature to ‘giving a four-year-old child a loaded gun’.  

Developer Chris Wetherell led the team that created retweeting at Twitter HQ in San Francisco, California, back in 2009, reports BuzzFeed News.

When building the tool, he hoped it would help underrepresented communities get their voices heard.

Instead, he now believes retweeting has created an online culture that helps misinformation spread and amplifies outrage.

Speaking of the first time he witnessed a ‘Twitter mob’ retweeting each other, Mr Wetherell told BuzzFeed News: ‘We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon. That’s what I think we actually did.’

Before Mr Wetherell’s invention, Twitter users would ‘retweet’ each other by copy and pasting a tweet and putting ‘RT’ at the beginning of it.

By removing the extra steps, people spent less time thinking about what they were sharing – leading to the spread of offensive content.

Mr Wetherell says he first realised the retweet button wasn’t necessarily a force for good during Gamergate in 2014.

Gamergate involved thousands of users harassing women in the gaming industry in a coordinated campaign. 

Mr Wetherell added: ‘It dawned on me that this was not some small subset of people acting aberrantly. This might be how people behave. And that scared me to death.’ 

During the 2016 presidential election, the retweet button also helped spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that claimed high-ranking Democratic Party officials were running a paedophile ring from a restaurant in Washington D.C.  

When building the tool, he hoped it would help underrepresented communities get their voices heard. Instead, he now believes retweeting has created an online culture that helps misinformation spread and amplifies outrage (file photo)

Although Mr Wetherell regrets creating the feature, he does not believe the button should be removed because people with larger audiences would be paid to share certain messages, giving them too much power.

He has suggested that Twitter instead create groups of people called audiences, and then removing the right to retweet content from audiences who share offensive content.

Mr Wetherell is not the only tech developer to dislike his own invention – Facebook like creator Justin Rosenstein revealed in 2017 that he has banned all apps on his phone because he doesn’t trust himself not to get addicted to them.

He told the Guardian that believes that the lure of social media and other apps can be as addictive as heroin and that they are having a noticeably detrimental effect on people’s ability to focus.

It comes as Instagram rolls out a trial in seven countries that bans likes and hidden them from the view of others.

While Instagram lovers will still be able to see a list of likes on their own posts, the number will be hidden from others looking at their account.  

The platform says it is part of an effort to make users feel happier online amid concerns social media can contribute to low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy in young people.   

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