[Update: The keen eyes of TNW’s readers have spotted the fact that the RT searches seem to be working again. We’ve contacted Twitter, but as of yet have not heard back from them either confirming or denying.]
Since the first days of Twitter, if you’ve liked something that someone said, it has traditionally been seen as appropriate to Retweet it. You would do that by giving a customary “RT @Username” then pasting their Tweet.
A few months ago, however, we were given an official Retweet function. The issue is that it confuses your timeline a bit, as it shows up as an almost unnoticeable function, and instead looks as if you’re following someone that you might not be. Further, it removes the ability for you to comment inside of the Retweet. So, despite the official function, “RT” has lived on.
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Twitter doesn’t seem to be too happy about that, though. It would appear that the site is, in fact, filtering out any Tweet containing the letters RT from searches. Ray’s 2.0 says this:
This seems a bit heavy-handed, to us. Especially when you consider that Twitter never announced the plan to filter these results. Though nobody has ever said that any website was a Democracy, Twitter’s uprising against the RT filter appears to be reaching a furor that might cause the brains behind Twitter to rethink their decision.
We’ll be keeping an eye on things. If I were a betting blogger, I’d place my wager on Twitter addressing the filter as a “coding error” that will soon be “corrected”.
Many thanks to Sam Sethi @ssethi for the heads up.
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