Las Vegas (United States) (AFP)
Twitter wants to test new ways to limit online harassment, in particular by offering social network users the means to control who can reply to a given tweet.
"We want to help people feel safer by participating in the conversation on Twitter and giving them more control over the conversations they start," said the micro-message network on his communications account.
"We will be testing various options on who can respond to tweets in early 2020," he added.
During a presentation at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, according to the specialized site TechCrunch, several company officials provided details.
From the 1st quarter, the bird network will test four options that will allow you to choose who can respond to a tweet.
The most radical option prevents everyone from replying to it while another option only allows the people named in the message to reply.
The user can also choose to let only respond to the accounts to which they subscribe or the most open option: all Twitter users.
For the time being, users have little choice to limit the responses to a tweet: pass their account "private" (with the small symbol of the padlock) or block people directly.
Even if a user decides to block all replies, his tweet will remain visible to everyone if his account is public. And everyone can quote the tweet on their own account.
While many Twitter users have faced harassment on the social network, the group has already taken several initiatives to try to clean up conversations on its platform and fight against malicious behavior.
Since November, the network has authorized its users to "hide" certain unwanted responses to their own tweets, in order to allow them to keep control over the conversation they have started. But it is not necessarily practical to have to hide the answers one by one when a conversation provokes a multitude of reactions.
Twitter also allows since September its users to automatically filter in a separate messaging private messages sent by accounts to which they are not subscribed.
However, after the last announcement, several Internet users were moved by the impossibility of replying to people who would send false information or public figures like Donald Trump.
"I agree with the risks you put forward; these are things that we took into account in the way we designed" the new options, replied Kayvon Beykpour, manager of the network product team social.
"It is for example important to continue to allow quoting tweets (an important way to challenge / dismantle another person's tweet) as well as to make it easier to see the quoted tweets," he added.
© 2020 AFP