Twitter is giving a new type of tweet, which disappears after 24 hours, a test run in Brazil.
The new type of message, dubbed a “fleet,” was designed to encourage people to post about their everyday life more often. The company hopes the disappearing nature of fleets will assuage worries that users may have about the permanency of what they post online.
Fleets are also different than tweets in the sense that they can’t be “re-fleeted” or liked. Users can interact with the new messages, though, but any replies to the fleets go directly to the fleeter and are private, not public threads, as is the case with tweets.
The new type of message mirrors moves made by other social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram, which both allow users to post photos with text that, unless saved to one’s phone, disappear after a day.
Twitter differs from other forms of social media in that it is used more frequently by high-profile public figures and politicians. President Trump’s Twitter feed has become a public platform on which he often expresses his thoughts.
However, tweets of years past have come back to haunt people.
In September, a man went viral when he held up a sign soliciting beer money via the money-sharing app Venmo and later decided to donate to the University of Iowa’s Stead Children’s Hospital. Soon after, the Des Moines Register wrote a profile on him and included offensive tweets he had written eight years prior. The move prompted outrage, and the reporter who wrote the story was fired after it was found that he himself had posted tweets containing the N-word years earlier.
It isn’t clear if fleets will become a permanent feature as it is just being tested in Brazil, but Twitter said it could expand the new type of messages to other countries if the fleets get a positive response.
