Abusive behaviour has long been an issue on Twitter, with the platform’s toxic effect a matter of continual discussion and criticism almost since its creation.
Twitter, on the other hand, has been working to resolve this issue. After years of apparently limited action, the company launched a variety of new features over the last one year, such as reply controls to limit unpleasant people in the comments, warning messages on potentially harmful and/or replies that are hostile, and Safety Mode, that notifies users when their twitter posts are receiving negative feedback.
These new capabilities, taken together, have the potential to have a significant influence – and Twitter isn’t done yet. Twitter revealed a couple more new control settings last week, which could help users avoid unwanted interactions and the mental stress that can accompany them when your tweets become the target of abuse.
To begin, Twitter is developing new ‘Filter’ and ‘Limit’ tools, which, as Twitter notes, are intended to assist users in keeping potentially harmful content – and the people who make it – out of their replies.
As seen above, the free tool would allow you to immediately filter out replies that contain potentially unpleasant remarks, or from persons who constantly tweet at you but with whom you never respond. You might also prevent these accounts from responding to your tweets in the future.
But, more importantly, the Filter feature would also imply that any replies you chose to hide would be hidden from everyone else in the app save the person who tweeted them, similar to Facebook’s ‘Hide’ option for post comments.
That’s a substantial shift in strategy. Twitter has previously allowed users to hide content from their own point of view in the app, but allowing others to see it. The Filter feature would, however, provide individual users the ability to completely hide such comments, which sounds logical given that they are replies to your Twitter posts. However, it is possible that this will be abused by politicians or companies seeking to silence bad remarks.
This will likely be a major concern for the Micro-blogging site, where Twitter’s real-time nature encourages response and conversation, as well as, in some instances, challenges to what people are saying, particularly around topical or newsworthy matters. If people can then shut down that conversation, it may have its own set of consequences — but the original tweet would still be available for reference, and users could theoretically quote tweets whatever they wanted.
And, with reply controls now available in the app, it’s definitely not a major effort, and it might help users get rid of some of the troll comments and creeps lurking in their replies, which could enhance overall app engagement.
