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October 31, 2013

Twitter’s new settings litter your feed with photos

You no longer have to click 'view photo' to see images. Is this an advertising tactic?

By Cbr Rolling Blog

Twitter has made a tweak to its feed that makes uploaded pictures appear automatically in your stream.

The days of clicking the ‘view photo’ button are over. Now you have no choice but to be confronted by every image posted by the people you follow on Twitter.

Many have deemed this change as the first of many in Twitter’s bid to be more like Facebook.

This alteration applies to both images directly uploaded to Twitter and also Vine videos. However, Instagram photos will not appear automatically, you will still have to click the link to see the image.

So although this change means less clicking and tweet extensions on your feed, it also means you could be confronted with more than you’d like to see.

Whether that’s explicit images popping up on your feed when you’re idly scrolling through on your lunch break at your desk, or having to put up with promoted ads and their new prevalence on your Twitter stream.

Promoted adverts have been a feature of Twitter for a while, and they were often easy to dismiss. But now, images are there, so the brand can make sure you’re aware of their existence even more than usual. This is especially annoying as since you are not following the brand’s account in the first place, you can’t stop following them to hide their adverts. Annoying, right?

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Although settings can be changed on the iPhone and Android Twitter app, there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid this constant stream of images on the web version.

So is this a way for Twitter to liven up your feed and bring more attention to your tweets…or is it simply a clever advertising tactic, a way of you to take notice of all these promoted Twitter accounts and all the images of their products that you MUST have right now?

We’ll let you decide. Let’s see how many more adverts you now notice on your Twitter feed…

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