Initially Twitter users had the option to report, mute or block users with content they deemed unnecessary, irrelevant, annoying or disrespectful. However Twitter is now reportedly testing a new feature that will allow users to control the replies to their tweets.
The “Hide Tweet” feature was first unearthed by Jane Manchun Wong on Thursday. Jane tweeted about her findings explaining how the new feature would probably work in the coming months.
Twitter is testing replies moderation. It lets you to hide replies under your tweets, while providing an option to show the hidden replies pic.twitter.com/dE19w4TLtp
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) February 28, 2019
Twitter through a spokesman confirmed that the company was in the process of developing the “Hide tweet” feature. The new feature would allow users to selectively hide some replies to their tweets.
“We’re working on ways to give people more control over the conversations they author on Twitter.” Said Kayvon Beykpour product lead at twitter & co-founder of Periscope.
According to Jane Wong users will still have an option to “View Hidden Tweets”.
In a thread Michelle Yasmeen Haq, senior product manager at Twitter, while explaining noted that the company really valued conversation starters on twitter and on that they wanted to give them more control over their content replies.
“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,”
Yasmeen added that Twitter was looking to keep conversation on twitter healthy by balancing between authors, repliers and the audience while at the same time allowing users to find critical comments that someone may want to hide from public.
“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.”
The discovery has so far raised a lot of debate on the “hide tweet” feature. Majority of twitter users believes that the move is an aim to prevent free flow of information and will likely used to silence critics.While in what was seen as a response to the above Yasmeen clarified that the hidden tweets could still be viewed.
“To make it clear, this doesn’t mean replies you’ve chosen to hide would disappear. If you, or other users want to see these replies, you’ll need to click a button called “show more replies” to view them.”
