It was first developed by Jonah Peretti at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center's R&D program under the project 'Reblog' (from where the term originates) as an open-source tool for individually-run blogs.
Reblogging (and the increased attention paid to the indexing and encouragement of reblogging) has become a major feature of many social networking sites and content-hosting services, and it has also become a potent means of secondary content promotion and audience measurement whereby links to external content are syndicated across multiple profiles and the reposts are indexed as a measurement of currency and relevance.
[11] Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022 and it's eventual rebrand to X in 2023, "retweet" was changed to a straightforward "repost."
Tweetmeme, Topsy and a few other external third-party websites provide indexes of currently trending posts, hashtags, users and lists utilizing the Retweet protocol.
[12] The Twitter platform is a broadcasting service and a social network of open access of media through subscriptions by request or follow.
[12] Facebook, while not promoting itself as a social bookmarking, social news or micro-blogging service, eventually also began allowing users to share links to and comments on external webpages to their walls, and notably to re-share posts from other users' walls with a single click of an attached "Share" link, "reblog-style".
Data scientists have shown that "retweeting cascades" play an important role in the spread of misinformation online.
Andy Baio found that about two thirds of the Gamergate harassment campaign tweets during a 72-hour period that he studied were retweets.