Twitter experiments with ‘Original Tweeter’ tag on threaded conversations

Twitter is about to make life a lot harder for fake Elon Musk cryptocurrency scammers.

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Twitter users are reporting seeing an ‘Original Tweeter’ tag under their name on posted tweets. According to Techcrunch, the feature has only been rolled out to a small percentage of Twitter users on iOS and Android so far.

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The tag appears to show up in threaded Twitter conversations in order to clearly mark the user who started the thread.

“Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation,” said Twitter Director of Product Management, Sara Haider, in a statement provided to Mashable. “As part of this work, we’re exploring adding more context to discussions by highlighting relevant replies – like those from the original Tweeter.”

At this year’s CES, Twitter made it very clear that the company was going to start prioritizing conversation on the service. The microblogging service teased a number of new, upcoming features at the event that are clearly meant to facilitate more interaction between users. Some of these new features include status updates and indicators to let other user’s know where you are and if you’re available to chat and a new design for replies that thread tweets much like a website’s comment section would do.

The ‘Original Tweeter’ tag is very reminiscent of features that mark the ‘OP’ or ‘Original Poster’ on old-school message boards or forums. Coupled with the company’s CES announcements, it should be very clear that Twitter is putting a focus on what’s happening underneath tweets, in the replies section.

This new feature also helps Twitter deal with another problem that was very prevalent last year on the platform: scammers. Malicious users would often set up fake accounts resembling high-profile tweeters and attempt to fool the individual’s fans in the replies to their tweets.

For example, scammers would respond to Elon Musk’s tweets, pretending to be the Tesla CEO, and try to scam other user’s of cryptocurrency. These scammer’s would even find ways to access verified accounts for their scheme, making the real account and the impersonator harder to distinguish. An ‘Original Tweeter’ tag for the thread starter appears to be impossible to fake.