Twitter has launched tweets that disappear in 24 hours known globally as Fleets and has echoed social media sites like Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram which already have disappearing posts.
The company said that the ephemeral tweets which is known as fleets because of their fleeting nature are designed to allay the concerns of new users who might be turned off by the public and permanent nature of normal tweets.
Fleets cannot be retweeted and they won’t have likes. People can respond to them and the replies show up as direct messages to original tweeter, not as a public response by turning any back-and-forth into a private conversation instead of a public discussion.
Twitter has also tested a feature in Brazil, Italy, India and South Korea before rolling it out globally.
Fleets are a low pressure way to communicate fleeting thoughts in comparison to permanent tweets as stated in a blog post by Twitter executives Joshua Harris, design director and Sam Havenson, product manager.
The news came on the same day when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced questions from a Senate Judiciary Committee about how they handled disinformation regarding the presidential election. The two sites have stepped up action taken against disinformation.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey promised lawmakers last month that they will aggressively guard their platforms from being manipulated by foreign governments or used to incite violence around election results and they followed through with high-profile steps that angered U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters.
The Fleets feature is reminiscent of Instagram and Facebook stories and Snapchat’s snaps that lets users post short-lived photos and messages. These type of features are increasingly popular with social media users looking for small groups and private chats.