On Retweeting

Abstract

Abstract A small, but growing literature in philosophy is devoted to the understanding of a seemingly new communicative action that came with the internet, and with Twitter in particular: the retweet. The spur for this literature is a kind of puzzle in public discourse: on the one hand, there is a tendency to hold people responsible for their retweets, and to blame them for retweeting material considered offensive or otherwise inappropriate. On the other hand, there is a widely shared, if not universally recognized feeling that, as the well-known disclaimer has it, “A retweet is not an endorsement.” But if a retweet is not an endorsement, what is it? And what is wrong with retweeting offensive or misleading tweets? This chapter puts forward the view that bare, uncommented retweets are best understood as lacking any sort of default illocutionary force, in contrast to many other types of speech acts. And, whereas with most speech acts, it is massively difficult to influence the norms governing that type of act, this may not be the case with retweeting. With retweeting, it is possible to consider ways that Twitter’s interface and code might be altered to revise the act of retweeting; likewise, it is possible to consider the likely impacts of such revisions on the norms surrounding retweeting. This raises a pair of interesting questions: (i) what should we want retweeting to be like, and (ii) how can we make progress in that direction?