One of the changes coming to Twitter will be the removal of the “Twitter for iPhone” and “Twitter for Android” labels which identify the device (iOS or Android) users Tweeted from.
When billionaire Elon Musk took charge of Twitter as its CEO in late October, he resolved to get rid of bots and trolls from the platform. Since then, the company has tested new features like the official labels, and $8 per month verification checkmarks to end bots but the fiasco failed miserably and was abandoned shortly after.
In a series of Tweets, Musk announced that the company has disabled “microservices” bloatware because only 20% were required for the service to work. He also added that the service would stop adding the line to identify which device a tweet was written on because it was a “waste of screen space & compute).
Twitter users lament the loss the humor, visibility, and bots detection
Over the years, several official accounts and celebrities have been caught promoting rival brands via the indicator. For example, actress Gal Gadot Tweeted a promotional video of her new Huawei smartphone from an iPhone. And who can forget the recent mishap by the Google Pixel team which sent a Tweet to mock Apple CEO Tim Cook using an iPhone.
In addition to the, soon, loss of memes taking Android users to the cleaners, Twitter users have also highlighted the importance of keeping the indicators.
In response to Musk’s comment “Literally no one even knows why we did that …”@Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D., a behavioral scientist pointed out the indicators are an aid to detecting bots on the platform, the goal Musk aims to achieve. She wrote:
I know why, or at least I know why I used that information — as a way to look for signs of multiple people tweeting behind the same account, and to look for clusters of accounts who all tweet with an obscure third party app. It’s useful. You should keep it there.
You don’t like bots and inauthentic activity, right? Well, that info is one way that people like me can start to detect inauthentic activity. Making that unavailable would make it harder to detect.
I know why, or at least I know why I used that information — as a way to look for signs of multiple people tweeting behind the same account, and to look for clusters of accounts who all tweet with an obscure third party app. It’s useful. You should keep it there.
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) November 14, 2022
Musk did not share a date or timeframe for when the device indicators will be removed. Maybe, he will decide to keep them based on the users’ feedback.
