In the past few hours, Twitter has confirmed the start of the test concerning the CoTweets, collaborative tweets co-signed by two authors, in the name of a useful function for normal users, brands, organizations, and journalists.
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There is no doubt that, in recent times, Twitter has been trying different ways to evolve, just think of the increasing attention given to Spaces, to the Blue subscription, to accessory functions such as SuperFollows, or to the recent Notes test (post more long in the normal 280 characters). A new stage of this evolutionary process has just been registered in the past few hours, with the admission of the test relating to “CoTweet” (in development for several months now).
According to what confirmed to The Verge by the spokesman of the platform, Joseph J. Nuñez, the social network has begun to test with some users in the USA, Canada and South Korea the new co-authored function mentioned above, to see how brands and simple users they will use it to collaborate, to grow, and / or reach a new audience. The test will be temporally limited and could also end with removing the function from everyone, removing the collaborative tweets created with it.
Specifically, admissions aside, CoTweet allows two users to jointly sign a tweet (on which we will have agreed via DM), a bit like it has been possible for months on Instagram where co-authorship concerns posts and Reels: all starts with the main author, who fills in the tweet and, in the appropriate editor, using the ad hoc shortcut, tags the user (with public profile or his follower) with whom he wants to sign what has been filled in.
The secondary author will receive in his private mailbox a message informing him of having been invited to share the authorship of a tweet and which, by accepting, will appear in the relative header as co-author: the user can refuse, and on this basis the draft of the cotweet will be deleted, or accepted and, in this case, the co-signed content will appear on the timelines of both, with users who will be able to reply to it, like it or retweet it. Of course, it will always be possible to withdraw your tag from a cotweet even after accepting the invitation and, in this case, the consequence will be that the tweet will appear as created only by the main author.
To date, however, the CoTweet feature still appears to be experimental. The embedding of the cotweets does not take into account their nature and shows them as created by a single author while, by clicking on the embedding, you will then be taken to the actual collaborative tweet in which the presence of two authors is clearly revealed. Furthermore, at the moment it is not possible to use CoTweets for example in a Twitter Community or Circle, and it is not clear what could happen if one of the two co-authors opts to cancel their account.