Following the worst trends in forced viewership as pioneered by Facebook, Twitter, Inc. is now testing the abomination of auto-playing videos.

According to Adage, the microblogging come messaging service is currently testing it in the United States only with “some users” of their iPhone and iPad apps.

The test is, rather bizarrely, said to be a test to see whether people are more likely to watch a video when it starts playing automatically as it does on Facebook, as opposed to the current, non-obtrusive model that requires the consent of a user to view the video by asking them to click to play.

The autoplay video test is said to apply to “Promoted Video” advertisements, as well as videos that users have uploaded through Twitter’s mobile apps. The test doesn’t apply to Vine videos, despite the fact that Twitter owns the service and a 6-second Vine video would be far less obtrusive than a longer video from a Twitter advertiser.

Do not want

From a purely business perspective, it’s understandable that Twitter wants to make more money from its service.

But does it have to be to the detriment of its service delivery to its users?

Why it needs to test whether more people will watch a video or not if it auto plays is a mystery, given the answer is yes because users will have no choice in the matter. Whether users actually pay attention to the auto-playing videos is an entirely different matter.

Although Facebook persists with the practice, you’ll struggle to find anyone who likes auto-playing video in their Facebook timeline, and likewise few outside of Twitter’s San Francisco office will like this proposal either.