Twitter is trying to crack down on its trolling problem.
The social media firm 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.
The other three options are: Anyone can reply; only those who a user follows can reply; and only those tagged in the tweet can reply.
Twitter revealed the plans at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas, where the firm has been hosting a media forum led by Kayvon Beykpour, its vice president of product.
“The primary motivation is control,” Beykpour reportedly said. “We want to build on the theme of authors [Twitter users] getting more control and we’ve thought… that there are many analogs of how people have communications in life.”
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.”
Twitter has long been trying to boost what it calls “conversational health” on its platform or, in plain language, the amount of abuse and trolling by users.
