Quote Tweets Have Turned Us All Into Jerks

How social media design choices help us shame each other

Launched in 2015, Twitter’s retweet with comment or “quote tweet” feature is now pro forma. Those of us on Twitter quote tweet for all kinds of reasons — to recommend a great podcast, amplify other voices, dunk on political opponents, or share cat videos with approving heart emojis. Quote tweets are useful in providing reference and sharing information.

But when we quote tweet, we’re also creating a kind of meme. And while memes can be fun, they also can make online conversation a lot more snarky and a lot less civil.

We tend to think of memes as self-contained visual objects (a picture with some text on it). We think of images like the “Distracted Boyfriend” or viral TikTok videos. Though they don’t follow the format of “text plus picture,” quote tweets are like memes because they repurpose other texts and make them their own unique visual object.

Courtesy of the author.

Some tweets decontextualize, but memes and quote tweets recontextualize — they draw attention to different media. They take a visual and say, “Hey, you scrolling down your timeline, you need…