Twitter announced it's testing a way to let users block all replies to their tweets - one of four planned options aimed at letting the platform's users personalize who can reply to their tweets. Twitter laid out their plans at this year's CES tech conference. Now CES might be an odd place of the social media firm but the company is keen to crack down on its trolling. This is a long term mission to curb the toxic conversations on its platform. The other three are:
- Anyone can reply
- Only those who a user follows can reply
- Only those in the tweet can reply
As reported by TechCrunch :
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. Beykpour, VP of product at the company.
Suzanne Xie, Twitter's director of product, echoed Beykpour's comments. She said:
We thought, well, what if we could actually put more control into the author's hands before the fact? Give them really a way to control the conversation space, as they're actually composing a tweet? The reason we're doing this is: if we think about what conversation means on Twitter, 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."
Other areas that Twitter discussed at the event included more focus on Topics, which will be expanded and taken global, and with that more work on how people can create and share lists. Even though Twitter has long been trying to reduce the amount of abuse and trolling by users through what it calls "conversational health." This has done very little to the abuse. With numerous celebrities and high profile figures quitting twitter on the grounds it has too many trolls, would this new feature be the remedy?