Twitter test brings emoji reactions to people's timelines (update)

Twitter is thinking of giving you the capability to react more strongly and appropriately to public tweets, based on the latest discovery by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong. The social network rolled out Facebook-like reactions for Direct Messages back in January, but at this point in time, you can still only “heart” tweets in public. Wong, who’s known for taking apps apart to look for hidden features in testing, found an experimental panel that lets you choose from a variety of reactions. It’s located right next to the Retweet and Retweet with Comment buttons.

As you can see, the options aren’t an exact copy of Facebook’s or even the reactions you’ll find in DMs. However, they could change if and when Twitter decides to release the feature to the public. In the image Wong posted, you’ll also see the option to React with Fleet, its Stories-like tweets that disappear after 24 hours. Twitter has been testing Fleets over the past months and found that it’s been seeing less instances of abuse when the disappearing messages are concerned.

Update 6/11/20 8:00PM ET: Bad news for everyone actually looking forward to this feature: Twitter has told The Verge that Wong found leftover code from a previous experiment. It’s unfortunately not actively working on or testing emoji reactions.