I love to retweet (RT) great items that I see on Twitter, and sometimes I am the 3rd or 4th person to RT the item.  But this also wastes our valuable 140 character acreage, but I wanted to know if this was really necessary to give credit to the original Tweeter, or just a polite thing to do. So I looked into it. Believe it or not Twitter actually has a policy on retweeting or as they like to call it: “Reposting others’ content without attribution”.

Twitters rules state that:

Reposting others’ content without attribution is against the Twitter rules

Re-posting another person’s updates without giving them credit and without their permission is a violation of Twitter’s rules.  Accounts re-posting others’ updates (with or without crediting the author)  may be immediately suspended because:

1. Re-posting others’ updates, regardless of stating authorship, is a potential form of spam
2. Re-posting others’ updates as one’s own without giving credit to the original author is tantamount to plagiarism

If an account is aggregating or re-posting others’ updates for a legitimate reason, such as collecting and re-posting all updates with the word “dream” into @dreamtweets profile, it’s ok as long as the original author is credited for their update.

http://twitter.zendesk.com/forums/26257/entries/16205

So if I understand this policy correctly, you must give credit to the original author of the tweet, however you do not need to give credit to all of the additional people who RT it before you see it.

Which makes sense since we only have 140 characters to work with. So we don’t have to include RT upon RT when we RT. .. but then again, it is the polite way to tweet.  

What is your personal policy on RT’s and ReTwittering?

UPDATE 22 JAN 2008

Thank you to @Kristie McNealy for catching the following line:

Re-posting another person’s updates without giving them credit and without their permission is a violation of Twitter’s rules.

Does this mean You have to asker permission to RT before you RT then? Lets find out.

Tags: Retweet, RT, Twitter