Twitter is now going to let you add reaction GIFs, images and videos to retweets

Twitter just announced that starting immediately on mobile, users can add GIFs to retweets. That’s right, you no longer have to just slap a downward pointing finger emoji on your retweets and call it a day. “Starting today, you can do something new with your Retweets – add a GIF,” Twitter explained in an email to Engadget. “Now, the same photos, videos, and GIFs that you add to a Tweet can be added to a Retweet, making it easier to share what’s on your mind and join the conversation when you can’t find the right words.” [caption id=“attachment_6254251” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] Twitter for iOS[/caption] In respective threads on Twitter, the company’s design and engineering teams explained why this feature took longer than expected to add. Twitter’s engineering team, for example, explained this was a rather big project because it impacted both the tweet detail page, as well as timelines.

As per a report by The Verge, a number of brands and creators are already using the new functionality on day one. However, the implementation of the feature hasn’t been perfected just yet. Twitter will likely fix these minor bugs soon.

These changes impacted the Tweet detail page and timelines so we accommodated design and functionality nuances across each of those areas. We also made sure to support accessibility, and achieved feature parity across clients.

— Engineering (@XEng) May 6, 2019

The update is being rolled out in stages so there’s no cause for panic if the feature isn’t showing up for you right away. This change, will surely at least temporarily clutter everyone’s timeline with garbage tweets until the novelty wears off. The feature is not yet available on desktop.