Twitter starts testing a CoTweets feature that lets two accounts co-author a tweet, with both accounts tagged in a single tweet, an idea it tested in March 2022
Twitter says it's testing CoTweets for a limited time — Twitter has started testing a new CoTweets feature this week with users of the social network.
Context & Ripple Effects
CoTweets is the latest entry in a long-running pattern of Twitter shipping experiments rather than finished products: the company confirmed work on easier tweetstorm publishing back in 2017, and in 2021 it previewed a batch of tests including trusted-friends sharing and tweeting under different personas, followed by Twitter Circle's 150-person sharing test in May 2022. Co-authoring a single tagged tweet extends that same pipeline from audience control to shared authorship.
The stakes are real for how collaborations get published: today joint announcements mean duplicate posts or manual "via @account" attribution. The arc of this feature is already written — Twitter shut CoTweets down in early 2023, folding it into the same graveyard as several of its other tests, which makes this a case study in how the platform evaluates experiments.
First-order effects
- Two collaborating accounts — brands, creators, or public figures — can publish one tweet that reaches both audiences natively, replacing duplicate cross-posting with a single shared engagement pool where replies and likes accrue to one post.
Second-order effects
- Manual attribution conventions ("with @x", "via @y") lose their purpose if co-authorship becomes native, and joint campaigns shift from coordinating separate posts to negotiating a single shared one — with both accounts' follower graphs doing the distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the test-and-kill cadence holds — Circle and personas surviving as tests while CoTweets did not — Twitter's feature pipeline functions as a low-cost R&D funnel where user behavior, not roadmap commitment, decides which formats become permanent, and shared authorship remains an experiment rather than an industry standard.
The trend: Social platforms are steadily moving from single-account broadcasting toward collaborative and audience-scoped formats, with Twitter's experiment pipeline determining which of those formats actually stick.