Twitter's shopping feature, aptly named Twitter Shops, reportedly brings harmful content moderation risks, which could potentially enable malicious posts, warns a recent leaked internal memo.

A news story by The Verge reports the internal memo was sent to the employees of Twitter last July. But the tech news outlet only obtained a portion of it.

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In this photo illustration, a phone screen displays the Twitter logo on a Twitter page background, in Washington, DC, on April 26, 2022.

Twitter Shopping Feature

The renowned social media giant introduced its shopping feature early this year or in March, debuting the new Twitter Shops feature.

According to a report by Tech Crunch, the new shopping feature on the microblogging platform enables businesses to post a collection of 50 products, which they could pin on their profiles on the social media giant.

The shopping function initially launched exclusively on its mobile app and website for free.

But unlike how shopping features on Facebook and Instagram work, Twitter is going against the tide with its counterpart.

In fact, Twitter Shops only redirects its users to a link outside its app. It opens the online shop of the merchant user using the in-app browser of the social media giant. Tech Crunch notes that it works akin to how the new shopping of TikTok also does.

Twitter Memo Warns Against Shopping Feature

And this time, The Verge reports that the shopping features of Twitter allegedly come with content moderation risks, the recent internal memo for the workforce of the social network revealed.

It turns out that some of the features of Twitter Shops, including current ones and future releases, have been categorized as high risk.

The memo also finds that the new shopping function of Twitter failed to prioritize content moderation.

To be more precise, the memo discloses that threat actors could use the feature maliciously. It comes as shop names and descriptions could be customized by merchants on the social media platform.

Read Also: Twitter is Testing Product Drop Feature That Allows Brands to Tease Items Before They Go on Sale

Twitter Confirms Internal Memo

The spokesperson of Twitter, Lauren Alexander, has confirmed the veracity of the leaked internal memo to The Verge.

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LONDON, ENGLAND - NOVEMBER 07: In this photo illustration, The Twitter logo is displayed on a mobile device as the company announced it's initial public offering and debut on the New York Stock Exchange on November 7, 2013 in London, England.

The Twitter spokesperson says that the memo is apparently part of a so-called feature assessment, which its product trust team has worked on.

Alexander goes on to add that they are "always working to improve the safety of our service, and that is particularly true for the addition of new products and features."

He further says they "have been intentional about taking the time to test our new shopping surfaces" before it rolls out to bigger markets.

Related Article: Twitter Launches New Shopping Features; Boosting Brands and First-Party Data Collection

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Written by Teejay Boris