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Twitter’s new changes will limit replies to stop abuse on social media



Twitter has announced new changes to the platform which will include limiting who can and cannot reply to tweets as a way to improve online conversations. 

Announced at CES in Las Vegas, Twitter’s director of product management Suzanne Xie said the platform is adding a “new setting for conversation participants.” When drafting a tweet to post, users will be able to select who can reply to it from four options: global, so anyone can reply; group, so people you follow and mention; panel, for people specifically mentioned in the tweet; and statement, which means no one can reply.  

The new feature has come from some of the experimentation the platform has been trying out on its other app Twttr. At the moment, Twitter is “doing research on the feature” but hopes to unveil it as an experiment in the first quarter of 2020, so expect to see it on your Twitter app before the end of March. 


Whilst some are criticising the move that it could allow people to silence their critics, it could also go some way to weeding out abuse online. A report by Amnesty International in 2018 demonstrated that women receive abusive tweets on average every 30 seconds. 

Speaking about this, Xie said: “Getting ratio’d, getting dunked on, the dynamics that happen that we think aren’t as healthy are definitely part of our thinking about this.” 

Instagram introduced a similar feature back in 2017 that would allow people with public accounts to limit who can comment on their post – either everyone, only the people they follow or their followers, or no one. In particular, celebrities jumped on the feature so they could limit the abusive comments they received online. Another Instagram feature includes the ability to block people from posting certain words or emojis underneath your posts. 

Cybersecurity expert, Jake Moore, praised the move. “This is an extremely positive step forward for Twitter. Cyber bullying has increased immensely since the rise of social media and amongst hundreds of positive comments on someone’s post or feed, it’s usually just the one negative remark that sticks in a victim’s mind. This can have hugely damaging effects,” he told the Standard

“Being able to manage who replies on the platform will hopefully give the control rightfully back to the user, and help mitigate the risk of being a victim of cyber bullying and trolling.” 

More change is afoot at Twitter too. There’s going to be improvements to its Lists feature, including making it easier to find lists as well as giving users the ability to customise the display of their chosen lists. 

The company is also pushing forward with its topics functions so in the future users will be able to follow “topics”, not just other accounts. When this goes live, if you see a tweet from someone you follow on a particular topic, then Twitter may add a button to prompt you to follow this topic under the tweet.  

Twitter has often been criticised for keeping updates and design changes to an absolute minimum, if at all, so it’s interesting to see how these new features will change how the platform works in the future. 

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