Twitter will soon allow users to limit replies to their tweets

Twitter will give users more control as to who can reply to their tweets in 2020. The company has announced that it is working on such a feature that offers more control over the existing set of features. With the upcoming control feature, Twitter aims at reducing the toxicity of its platform, often done in the form of bullying or trolling.

As a part of the new feature, Twitter will give users four options to tailor the replies under their tweets. These four choices include ‘anyone can reply’, ‘only accounts a user follows can reply’, ‘only those tagged can reply’, and ‘no replies at all’. Twitter refers to these four options as ‘Global’, ‘Group’, ‘Panel’, and ‘Statement’, respectively.

Twitter’s VP of Product Kayvon Beykpour made the announcement earlier today at the CES 2020 in Las Vegas. “The primary motivation is control. We want to build on the theme of authors getting more control and we’ve thought that there are many analogs of how people have communications in life,” said Beykpour to TechCrunch.

There is no word on when exactly will the new feature be rolled out to the public. The TechCrunch report states that Twitter will roll out the four options in Q1 2020. Like previous Twitter features, the company will perform a test rollout to a few users and will release the feature for everyone depending upon the reaction.

“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,” said Suzanne Xie, Head of Conversations at Twitter.

Last year, Twitter introduced a new moderation tool called ‘Hide replies’ that allows the users to hide responses from the main conversation that are off-topic.