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Twitter confirmed today the development of a new feature "Hide Tweet", which will offer users another option to protect their conversations. The option, found in the Twitter code, is available in a list of moderation choices that appears when you click the "Share" button on a tweet – a button whose icon has also been refreshed, apparently he. As seems to be the case, "Hide Tweet" is an alternative to muting or blocking a user, while providing some control over a conversation.
In the same order of ideas, the option "Show hidden tweets" was also found. This allows a user to reveal the tweets previously hidden by the original poster.
The "Hide Tweet" feature was discovered by Jane Manchun Wong, who tweeted about his discoveries on Thursday.
Wong says he found this feature in the Android application code of Twitter.
Reaching a comment earlier Thursday, Twitter told TechCrunch that employees would soon post a tweet about the context of the feature, but tweets was only released later in the evening.
A spokesman for Twitter confirmed that the company was actively working on this feature.
Immediately, we were worried that such an option would allow users to silence their critics – not just for themselves, as is currently the case with blocking or blocking – but for anyone reading a stream of Twitter responses. Imagine, for example, if a controversial politician started to hide tweets he did not like or those who contradicted a scandalous statement with factual control, people said.
The user must also click to display the hidden answers, which some users may not know and others may not even bother to do. They can then miss out on an important point of the conversation or a critical fact check.
On the other hand, putting the original poster back into control of visible responses can make it easier for people to share their impressions on Twitter, which could have an impact on user growth. number of problems that Twitter is facing today. And that could encourage people to debate with less vitriol, knowing that their worst tweets could be masked.
Wong's first screenshots do not immediately indicate if the "Hide Tweet" button is hiding something that is hiding the tweet. everyone's point of view, or just the person who clicked the button.
However, Wong later released the code reference itself, in which the feature is described as a "moderation" action, which implies more health of the conversation as a whole than the personal setting.
Thursday night (after the publication of this message, which has since been modified to reflect additional details), Twitter's Prime Minister Michelle Yasmeen Haq posted a thread explaining Twitter's reflection on the Hide Tweet feature.
She wrote:
Heavy tweeters often tell us that they want to be able to protect their conversations …
People who start interesting conversations on Twitter are very important to us and we want to give them the means to make the conversations they start as healthy as possible by giving them some control.
We consider conversations as an ecosystem of different groups: authors, suppliers, audience and platform. We try to balance the experience of the four groups and we constantly explore ways to change the balance without over-correcting.
We're already seeing people trying to keep their conversations healthy by using the blocking, muting and reporting features, but these tools do not always deal with the problem. Blocking and Muting only changes the blocker experience, and the report only works for content that violates our rules.
With this feature, the person who has started a conversation can choose to hide the responses to his tweets. Hidden responses would be visible to others via a menu option.
We believe that the transparency of hidden responses would allow the community to notice and report situations in which people use this feature to hide content with which they do not agree. We think this can balance the product experience between the original tweeter and the audience.
In the coming months, we plan to start testing this publicly, so stay tuned for more and keep telling us what you think!
The discovery of this feature comes at a time when Twitter was under increasing pressure to improve the overall conversational health of its platform.
In a recent interview, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted He added that Twitter was looking for new ways to proactively enforce and promote health, so blocking and reporting was the last option.
A "Hide Tweet" button does not appear to be part of this plan because it requires direct user involvement in the moderation process.
It should also be noted that Twitter already has a "hidden tweets" feature.
In 2018, the company has implemented a new filtering strategy. to hide disruptive tweets, which take into account various behavioral signals – for example, if the account has checked its email, is often blocked or tweets often on accounts that do not follow it, for example. If Twitter determines that the tweet needs to be downgraded, it moves it to its own isolated part of the answer lead, under the "Show more replies" button.
Twitter is testing a number of things that never see the light of day in a public product. More recently, the company said it was considering the idea of a "clarification function" to explain old tweets. It also launches an application prototype that will test new ideas around conversation threads.
Update, February 28, 2019, 4:55 pm ET: Added tweet with additional code reference.
Update, February 28, 2019, 6:55 pm ET: Adding Twitter comments on Haq's thread.
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