On November 05, 2009 Twitter started a limited rollout of the
‘retweet’ feature to its users. The practice of retweeting has
been invented two years earlier by Twitter community and the
first ReTweet is often attributed to user Eric Rice. He is said
to have coined the term ‘ReTweet’ on 18 April 2007: Rice’s
ReTweet would soon be shortened to RT due to Twitter’s
140-character limit and the practice of retweeting was quickly
adopted by other users, third-party application developers and
eventually by Twitter itself. Users and third-party apps
developed their own retweet practices. Most commonly the whole
tweet would be copy pasted and prefixed with RT @username (of
the original poster) but some users would modify the retweet
slightly by editing it so it would fit the 140-character limit.
This also gave rise to the ‘fake retweet’ by pretending to
retweet an existing tweet, but instead, this tweet would be
newly created. Such fake retweets often concern celebrities,
where users will impersonate celebrities by cre