Twitter is often criticized for having become a nightmare tool that favors the emergence of hate speech, threats and harassment of all types of users.

Those responsible for the platform have never been able to propose especially effective measures to avoid the problem, but in 2020 we may finally have a way to mitigate the problem: the conversations we have on the platform will now offer much more control to users, who may Decide who can respond to your tweets.

More control over who can respond to your tweets

This experiment will take advantage of the launch of the first public application in prototype Twitter format, which the company has called “twttr” (all lowercase) and that will allow the company to test what works and which do not and then take them to the general public.

One of the top product managers, Suzanne Xie, explained at CES 2020 how they will carry out these changes in the general application. Each tweet can be classified into four types of conversation profiles:

• Global: allows anyone to respond and interact, as now happens with the tweets we publish.
• Group: Let the people you mentioned or the people you follow respond to your tweet
• Panel: Only those people mentioned in the tweet will be able to respond
• Communication: directly avoid any response to the tweet you assign to this conversation profile

The deployment of these options is in the experimental phase. Xie explained that Twitter is “in the process of investigating this characteristic” and that “the sketches are part of an experiment that we will carry out” during this first quarter of the year.

It is expected that the comments and suggestions that come with that experimental period will serve to polish the operation of an option that would appear throughout the year, although there are no specific dates for its long-standing among users.

This is a new way to focus those conversations that users kept on Twitter, and according to Xie, it will allow you to “understand who is talking to you in a conversation.” In twttr, the conversations will be shown slightly differently: we can get more information about the answers, respond directly or see how those answers have a different shaded background to differentiate them from the tweets that surround it.