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Twitter users could soon be able to hide replies

Social media platform Twitter is developing a feature that would let users hide replies to their ...
Jack Quann
Jack Quann

10.55 1 Mar 2019


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Twitter users could soon be ab...

Twitter users could soon be able to hide replies

Jack Quann
Jack Quann

10.55 1 Mar 2019


Share this article


Social media platform Twitter is developing a feature that would let users hide replies to their tweets.

Michelle Yasmeen Haq, senior product manager at Twitter, has confirmed the company will start testing it publicly "in the coming months".

She said: "We often hear from heavy Tweeters that they want to be able to protect their conversations.

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"People who start interesting conversations on Twitter are really important to us, and we want to empower them to make the conversations they start as healthy as possible by giving them some control.

"We think of conversations as an ecosystem of different groups: authors, repliers, the audience and the platform.

"We try to balance the experience across all four groups, and we are continuously exploring ways to shift the balance without over-correcting."

She added: "We already see people trying keep their conversations healthy by using block, mute, and report, but these tools don't always address the issue.

"Block and mute only change the experience of the blocker, and report only works for the content that violates our policies."

"With this feature, the person who started a conversation could choose to hide replies to their tweets."

She explained that the hidden replies would be viewable by others through a menu option.

Haq added: "We think the transparency of the hidden replies would allow the community to notice and call out situations where people use the feature to hide content they disagree with.

"We think this can balance the product experience between the original Tweeter and the audience."

Twitter is also considering a few other changes.

Last month, CEO Jack Dorsey said the company was 'looking at' an edit button.

He said: "We don't have edit Tweets right now - if you can't edit 140 characters, you're going to be really p****d off if you write a million characters and can't edit those things".

"The reason we don't have it in the first place is we were born on SMS, we were born on text messaging - when you send a text you can't take it back".

"So when you send a tweet it goes to the world instantaneously - you can't take it back".

"But you could build it such that maybe we introduce a five send to 30 second delay in the sending, and within that window you can edit".

"The issue with going longer than that, it takes that real-time nature and the conversational flow out of it."


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