Twitter tries to be Instagram by testing out edge-to-edge media display

Twitter just rolled out their new edge-to-edge Tweet UI change to select iOS users. This expands media such as images, videos, or GIFs to not have any borders and take up the entire width of the screen.

If you don’t have this change yet (like me), you can get a taste of what it might look like in the promo video posted below.

Twitter said that they are testing this change to “better support conversations that are both visual and text-based”. This is one of many things they added to be more accessible for everyone, such as Image Descriptions and automated captions for audio and video. You can also see this take form in a ‘video summary’ they replied with, explaining the video so that neurodivergent or visually impaired people don’t have to watch it.

The actual feature has garnered mixed reviews. Some don’t mind it, while others hate it and demand for Twitter to change it back. Before this, tweeting out two images would result in two 7:8 aspect ratio pictures, which look more square-like. This new update seems to make them 2:1 aspect ratio vertical images which I can imagine might anger some visual artists, as it cuts off side elements like the entire finger in the example below.

When it comes to how media is displayed on the timeline, this is not the first change to happen. Due to a controversy showing a bias toward white faces in Twitter’s cropping algorithm, they made it so that images would not even crop anymore, showing a larger and taller picture instead.

For a while now, Twitter has been actively and unashamedly trying to copy features from its competitors. For example, as soon as Clubhouse became popular, Twitter launched their ‘Spaces’ feature which essentially is the same idea of having live audio conversations. They also copied Instagram stories with the Fleets feature, which ended up getting trashed recently.

Edge-to-edge media is still in a testing phase, so Twitter might end up trashing this idea too if it is not well received.

So, what do you think? Do you like the edge-to-edge media or do you prefer the original? Let us know in the comments!

[ SOURCE, IMAGE SOURCE ]