Twitter Shutting Down Its CoTweets Feature for Co-Authored Tweets After Months of Testing

Twitter has once again shut down a feature even before its stable rollout. Twitter’s collaborative tweeting feature ‘CoTweets,’ which was rolled out for testing last year, has been shut down. The microblogging site started testing this feature in July 2022 for select users across US, Korea, and Canada. However, the feature has now been shut down even before its stable rollout. CoTweets would have allowed for two different Twitter users to tweet together. Twitter has gone through several changes, introducing and removing new and old features, since Elon Musk acquired the social media platform in October 2022.

According to the announcement made on Twitter’s Help Page, the testing of Twitter’s CoTweets has come to an end effectively from January 31. Twitter said that CoTweets feature will no longer be available and existing CoTweets will be viewable for one more month, after which they will be reverted to Retweets. Once implemented, all existing CoTweets will appear as Retweets on the co-author’s profile and on their followers’ timelines.

Twitter rolled out CoTweets testing last year in July, enabling two accounts to co-author a tweet. This feature was tested for some select accounts in the United States, Canada, and Korea. However, the company had said that they may turn off this feature at the end of the experiment and any CoTweets that were created may be removed.

The CoTweets feature lets eligible Twitter users send out an invite to co-author a tweet with another user. The co-authored tweets used to have the profile picture and handles of both co-authors. “A CoTweet is a co-authored Tweet that’s posted simultaneously to both authors’ profiles and their followers’ timelines”, the company’s FAQ page explains.

Meanwhile, a latest update to Twitter has reportedly removed the DM icon from users’ profile pages for several Android and iOS Twitter users. The option to send direct messages has reportedly disappeared for many users on both platforms. The “DM” icon used to appear between Follow and Notification buttons on a profile page. Several Twitter users have reported the issue on the microblogging site. However, users can still send direct messages by going to the Messages tab and searching for the account they want to send a direct message to. It is yet unclear if the missing DM button is a bug or if Twitter has officially removed the icon in its recent update.