In the present day in Twitter: the place are the retweet labels, and why did Doge change the chook?

Seems prefer it’s going to be one other regular week on the chook website: individuals’s “Following” timelines are seemingly being flooded with unlabeled retweets from individuals they don’t comply with, and lots of people are seeing a Doge icon the place the corporate’s chook emblem was once.

Relating to the primary one, no, your Following timeline isn’t all of the sudden being run by the algorithm behind the “For You” one. Twitter has merely stopped labeling retweets. Beforehand, when somebody you adopted retweeted one thing, the tweet would have a observe above it saying who was chargeable for it exhibiting up in your timeline. Now, that label appears to have vanished on the internet, so the tweets look precisely like those from the individuals you comply with.

If you happen to click on into the tweet, the retweet label exhibits again up, and when you attempt to reply to it, it’ll nonetheless tag the one who retweeted it. That performance nonetheless being round, and the truth that the labels are nonetheless there on the timeline within the iOS and Android apps, in addition to TweetDeck, makes this appear extra like a bug than an intentional change.

As for the Doge icon exhibiting up on the loading display screen and within the higher left nook of the net UI, it’s exhausting to say how that may be a bug until it’s simply an April Fools’ day joke that confirmed up two days late. CEO Elon Musk has been a famous booster of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency and has, at occasions, let individuals purchase sure items of Tesla merch with the memecoin. After all, the worth of Doge has spiked for the reason that canine took over Twitter, going from below 8 cents to virtually 9 cents.

Just like the retweet labels, the Doge rebranding appears to solely apply to Twitter’s net UI, not its apps.

Nowadays, it’s exhausting to inform whether or not any of that is on function. Twitter’s press e mail robotically responds to requests for remark with a poop emoji, and Musk hasn’t tweeted about the change to retweet labels. He has reposted a meme in regards to the Doge swap, which one among his followers tweeted as a riff on one among Musk’s tweets on Sunday.

Final week, Twitter stopped exhibiting what tweets individuals have been replying to, filling our timelines with replies that simply appeared like imprecise subtweets. Ultimately, that change was rolled again, although once more, it wasn’t clear whether or not Twitter was fixing a bug or undoing an unpopular coverage resolution.

Replace April third, 2:42PM ET: Added context in regards to the lawsuit in opposition to Musk for promotting Dogecoin.

Replace April third, 3:13 PM ET: Up to date to notice that Musk has tweeted a meme in regards to the Doge emblem.