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Twitter announced today the creation of a new feature allowing users to hide responses to their tweets. The feature, first noticed by the software expert Jane Manchun Wong, would bring a radical change in the way users control the conversations they create on the platform. This would not let a user hide the answers permanently, but it would make these answers more difficult to see in the event that the original conversation starter wanted to discourage bad faith or otherwise unpleasant discussions around their tweets .
"People who start interesting conversations on Twitter are very important to us and we want to empower them to make them as healthy as possible by giving them some control," says Michelle Yasmeen Haq, senior product manager at the company. who discussed the feature publicly on his personal Twitter account late this afternoon. "We're already seeing people trying to keep their conversations healthy by using the lock, mute and report features, but these tools do not always deal with the problem. Blocking and muting only changes the experience of the blocker, and the report only works for content that violates our rules. "
Essentially, the feature would allow you to click the "Share" icon on Twitter and choose "Hide Tweet" to close the answers. From there, other users should click to see the responses on a tweet, instead of seeing them automatically. There also seems to be an option to view all the tweets you have hidden in the past and display them manually if you want to reopen the answers later.
By giving users the ability to hide responses, Yasmeen Haq thinks that Twitter can "balance the product experience between the original tweeter and the audience." In addition, the "transparency of hidden responses would allow the community to notice and report situations where people are using In other words, by hiding responses, you can tell your audience that the conversation has become toxic or hijacked, as if you turned off comments on YouTube or if you did so on Reddit. and other forums.
Of course, this feature could prove to be a double-edged sword for Twitter. Although conversations under a controversial tweet often become abusive and begin to involve harassment and other personal attacks, it also happens that responding to a tweet has become an essential means of empowering the powerful, such as politicians. The "Twitter ratio", as we describe moments when a tweet generates more responses than preferences and retweets, is one of the ways that a large public on Twitter can exercise criticism and dissatisfaction.
It is usually used against officials who make a blatant remark or against people who have made other mistakes online and that Twitter users then happily report with an answer. In some cases, however, this ratio may be the product of harassment campaigns that target harmless tweets with irrelevant criticism, as part of a broader effort to make unhappy the experience of someone out there. Twitter.
It may be this kind of abusive behavior, whether used by online progressives or by trolls and stalkers, that Twitter no longer wants to encourage through the design of its products. The company has released a number of new features and tools over the years that allow you to personalize your Twitter experience. You can disable certain words, customize your notification flow so that only the followers follow you and make sure that the blocked accounts never appear in the search results.
Twitter has also become, in recent years, more of a referee of the public space that he oversees, proactively hiding sensitive content and filtering conversations from accounts known for their inflammatory and abusive nature. Yesterday again, the company banned Jacob Wohl, theoretician of the far-right plot, of public notoriety, after the Trump supporter boasted of the use of fake accounts to influence him. public opinion during the US election of 2020. Of course, these actions have led to accusations that Twitter's leadership is biased against the conservatives.
It's unclear how this feature will be received by Twitter's most ardent users. It's easy to see a world in which hiding your responses on Twitter is tantamount to disabling comments on YouTube, an approach that, while supposedly useful for fighting harassment, is now seen by the YouTube community as a defensive and embarrassing maneuver aimed at : Cancel the reviews and avoid any liability. It is also disconcerting to think that officials and others in a position of strength using the function in question are a means of labeling certain comments or declarations made on Twitter as positive, even though large sections of the public could condemn the speech. hidden. answers.
That said, Twitter has a limited number of tools in its arsenal with which it can force people to no longer be terrible to each other online. By allowing you to hide the answers, the company gives these valuable tools to its users and hopes they exercise it with caution and caution, but also as a way to make Twitter a more nourishing and interesting place and a less unpleasant environment and abusive. . However, like most aspects of Twitter, the use of the feature will reflect the attitudes of its users, whether it results in a positive change of conversation on the platform or a negative reaction.
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