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Twitter tests new feature that could make it more civil

Jan 08, 2020, 7:07 PM

Alan Friedman @wolfcallsputs

Twitter tests new feature that could make it more civil

Twitter is looking to improve its image of a social media site gone awry. The site is full of hate, anger and fake news. According to Bloomberg, Twitter is hoping that by allowing users to limit who can respond to their tweets, it will be able to reduce the extreme level of hostility that Twitter is known for. Users chosen to test this new feature will be able to select one of four options when deciding who can reply to their tweets. The choices will include: anyone, only those who follow the author of the tweet, only people mentioned in the tweet, and no replies.

Twitter executive Kayvon Beykpour announced the new feature at CES in Las Vegas today and said, "The primary motivation is control. We want to build on the theme of authors getting more control and we’ve thought that there are many analogs of how people have communications in life. Right now, public conversation on Twitter is you tweet something everyone in the world will see and everyone can reply, or you can have a very private conversation in a DM. So there’s an entire spectrum of conversations that we don’t see on Twitter yet."

Back in November, Twitter started giving users the option to hide certain replies to tweets that they had written in an attempt to head off any acrimonious debate. Now, Twitter is tightening things up by giving users the opportunity to block users from replying to their tweets. This new feature will start out as a test that only certain members will receive and if it is well-received, we would expect it to be offered to all Twitter members.

Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey has made comments about how improving the "health" of Twitter is his top priority. Yet Dorsey is under attack for his uneven disciplinary tactics. RawStory reports that a large number of Twitter members are confused about why its terms of service aren't applied to President Donald Trump who recently threatened to commit War Crimes against Iran. New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali recently wrote, "The world would be safer if Trump was de-platformed by [Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey] for his repeated abuses of this site’s own standards. I say this with utmost seriousness."

While the most recent data has not been released, Twitter had approximately 330 million monthly active users at the end of last year's first quarter. That was down from the all-time high of 336 million monthly active users that were counted during the first quarter of 2018.