Twitter test asks if you want to read an article before retweeting it

Twitter will be testing a new prompt for retweets, the company announced Wednesday. The prompt will appear when you attempt to retweet a link to article that you haven’t opened on Twitter. Before retweeting something, it will now ask if you would like to read the article first.

“Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you tweet it,” the company said. “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.”

A 2016 study by Columbia University and the French National Institute (Inria) found 59% of all articles shared on social media go unclicked and by extension unread.

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

The feature will be tested on Android devices for now.