Right now in Twitter: the place are the retweet labels, and why did Doge substitute 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 observe, and lots of people are seeing a Doge icon the place the corporate’s chook brand was once.

Concerning the primary one, no, your Following timeline isn’t immediately 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 word above it saying who was accountable for it displaying up in your timeline. Now, that label appears to have vanished on the net, so the tweets look precisely like those from the individuals you observe.

Should you click on into the tweet, the retweet label reveals again up, and should 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 displaying up on the loading display screen and within the higher left nook of the online UI, it’s arduous to say how that may be a bug except 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 because the canine took over Twitter, going from underneath 8 cents to nearly 9 cents.

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

As of late, it’s arduous to inform whether or not any of that is on goal. 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 in every of his followers tweeted as a riff on one in every of Musk’s tweets on Sunday.

Final week, Twitter stopped displaying what tweets individuals had been replying to, filling our timelines with replies that simply appeared like imprecise subtweets. Finally, 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 determination.

Replace April third, 2:42PM ET: Added context in regards to the lawsuit towards 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 brand.