The creation of Twitter’s retweet button has been likened to giving a child a “loaded weapon”, according to the man who developed the feature.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Chris Wetherell told the publication that neither he nor anyone else at the social media firm could have anticipated how it would change the platform’s dynamic.

“We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon,” he said. “That’s what I think we actually did.”

Wetherall led the team that built the retweet button during the platform’s infancy in 2009. Previously, users were forced to manually retweet each other by copying a tweet and typing ‘RT’, along with the name of the original poster.

While the retweet button is now an ever-present core feature on the platform, Wetherell believes changes must be made to prevent the spread of toxic content on the site. In recent years, Twitter, along with other social media platforms such as Facebook, have been heavily criticised over the spread of fake news, misinformation and hate speech.

Twitter’s retweet button, while not intended for this purpose, plays a big role in the proliferation of content on the platform – much of which is negative.

“I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented,” Wetherell said. He noted that in the early days, many believed the retweet feature could help improve engagement on the platform and had the potential to “elevate voices from under-represented communities”.

• Facebook to pay $5 billion fine over privacy violations
• The global economy loses £2.3 million every minute to cybercrime
• Human rights campaigners demand ‘digital strip search’ law reform

Once the button was added, Wetherell told Buzzfeed that he was surprised at just how effective it proved to be.

“It did a lot of what it was designed to do. It had a force multiplier that other things didn’t have,” he said.  “We would talk about earthquakes. We talked about these first response situations that were always a positive and showed where humanity was in its best light.”

Wetherell’s first glimpse at the negative power of the button came during ‘Gamergate’ in 2014 – a harassment campaign launched against women working in the games industry.

This was the moment he first realised the button would prove problematic. As the campaign progressed, he saw that participants were using the function to coordinate – or ‘brigade’ – their attacks against specific targets on the platform.

“It was very easy for them to brigade reputational harm on someone they didn’t like,” he explained. “Ask any of the people who were targets at that time, retweeting helped them get a false picture of a person out there faster than they could respond. We didn’t build a defence for that. We only built an offensive conduit.”

Wetherell described Gamergate as a “creeping horror story” and a point at which it dawned on him that it wasn’t simply a “small subset of people acting aberrantly”, but instead could be an indication of how users act on the platform – a trend which has continued for a decade.

Changes could be coming to Twitter in the near future, with alterations to functions such as the retweet button. Founder Jack Dorsey has previously spoken about potential changes.

During an appearance at the Vancouver TED conference earlier this year, Dorsey explained that the company was considering ways it could demote likes and follows.

In hindsight, he said, they would not have designed the platform to include or place such an emphasis on these features. He also told BuzzFeed this is an area which may need to be re-examined.

“Definitely thinking about the incentives and ramifications of all actions, including retweet,” he said. “Retweet with comment, for instance, might encourage more consideration before spread.”