Twitter has been trying several changes to make its platform more users friendly and it has now announced some new changes. The news changes, expected to roll this year, were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 in Las Vegas. Out of all the changes announced by Twitter, the most impactful and the one that gained most attention is a new setting to define ‘conversation participants.’ There were will four options in the setting to let users choose who can reply to their tweets. The four options will be – Statement, Panel, Group, and Global. While Global lets everyone on Twitter to reply, Group restricts replying to people followed by the person. When a user selects the Panel option, it will only allow people specifically tagged in the post to answer. Statement option, as the name suggests, will restrict everyone from replying and your tweet will be simply a statement.
The San Francisco based company in a statement said that it wants to make Twitter a safe place for conversation by providing users more control over the conversations they start. The feature is expected to be rolled out by March. However, some experts feel that it will snatch away the power of rebutting misinformation as not one will be able to reply. Reacting to it, Suzanne Xie – Twitter’s director of product management – said people will have to option of quoting the tweet. Xie also emphasized that these things will be closely monitored by Twitter during the experiment.
The microblogging site has been experimenting with such features to limit harassment on its platform for quite some time. The company has already launched a feature that allows users to hide certain replies to their tweets. This feature was launched in November 2018. The latest feature could be useful at fighting abuse and harassment but can be misused by political outfits as leaders can select the Group option to limit the replies to just their followers. This will make it look like that they have universal support for their policies.
Carolyn is a technology graduate and loves to write about anything related to technology as well as writes in others sectors. Carolyn is a professional writer with over 7 years of experience. Initially starting off as a programmer, Carolyn decided to combine her knowledge about technology and writing and that’s how she joined Reporter Expert.
