Twitter to let users limit or block replies to tweets
Twitter is adding another safety control to help curb abuse and harassment on its network.
Users will soon be able to determine who can reply to their tweets.
Focusing specifically on conversations, Twitter announced that it will soon give users four options to allow them to decide who can participate in their conversations or threads on its platform.
When posting a message, users will also be able to choose who can reply: anyone, just their followers, only people mentioned in the tweet, or no one at all.
According to The Verge, the new feature, which was announced on Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 technology conference in Las Vegas, is an effort aimed at limiting harassment and other types of unhealthy interactions between users, a problem Twitter has been working to fix for years.
Twitter’s director of product management, Suzanne Xie, said that Twitter is adding a new setting for “conversation participants” right on the compose screen. The feature would have four reply settings.
The “global” setting would allow any user to reply to the tweet, the “group” setting would limit replies just to people you follow or mention in the tweet, the “panel” setting would limit it just to people you mention, and “statement” would block all replies. Even though other users wouldn’t be able to reply to some tweets, they still would be able to read and screenshot them.
In November, Twitter gave users the option to hide specific replies to tweets so that others wouldn’t be able to see them, a related feature for fighting abuse on the service.
Now it’s taking that a step further with the option to block replies altogether, something it “will be experimenting with” in early 2020 according to the company.