By Pascal Oparada,
Social Media/Tech Reporter
Apart from verified accounts, you can now know who owns or started a conversation as Twitter begins testing a new feature which allows users parse who started a conversation first on the platform.
With a lot of tweets now stolen, plagiarized or outrightly impersonated, the new feature, which shows as Original Tweeter under a user name, has rolled out to some users across markets.
Twitter’s Director of Product Management Sara Haider told TechCrunch in a statement that Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation.
“As part of this work, we’re exploring adding more contexts to discussions by highlighting relevant replies – like those from the original Tweeter.”
The new feature will be helpful when an influential person releases a tweet or thread. It would also make it easier to identify the owner of a tweet which may have gained serious traction on the platform that it becomes difficult to know who or where it started from.
With Twitter’s verification project on hold, users would now use Original Tweeter to know when a tweet is authentic or not and/or is coming from an influential person.
The platform is also testing a beta version where replies to a tweet are colour-coded to distinguish them from the original owner of a threat or tweet.