Update 2 (8/11/20 @ 3:36 PM ET): Twitter announced today that everyone will now be able to limit who can reply to their tweets.

Update 1 (5/20/20 @ 3:00 PM ET): Twitter is officially starting to roll out the ability to limit who can reply to your tweets. The original article, as published on January 8, 2020, is as follows.

CES 2020 is well underway and Twitter’s director of product management, Suzanne Xie, has unveiled some new changes that are coming to the platform later this year. These changes all primarily focus on conversations that you can have on the platform and aim to prevent bullying and harassment. The biggest change relates to "conversation participants." Rather than hiding your Tweets from people who you don't want to see it, you can simply prevent people from replying instead. You can limit your tweet to one of four groups: “Global, Group, Panel, and Statement.”

"Global" is exactly what it says on the tin, anyone can reply and interact, just like a regular public tweet. After that is where things get interesting. "Group" is made up of the people you tag and the people you follow, "Panel" is only the people you specifically tweet at, and "Statement" entirely prevents all replies. Xie says that Twitter is “in the process of doing research on the feature” and that “the mockups are going to be part of an experiment we’re going to run” in the first quarter. The feature will then hopefully be globally launched later in the year, taking on board feedback from the public testing.

“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,” Xie said. A major concern then would be the attempt at spreading misinformation, which Xie mentioned the possibility of quote tweeting as a solution. Even still, Xie said that possibility is "something we’re going to be watching really closely as we experiment."

Xie also mentioned that the company is working on other features such as threading, to allow all of a Twitter conversation to be displayed on one screen. Lines drawn on the screen would make it easier to then see who is replying to who. Twitter is always messing with things and beta testing new features, which you can enable some of through Tweeks, an Xposed module.

[appbox googleplay com.twitter.android&hl=en]

Via: The Verge


Update 1: Small Rollout

Twitter is officially beginning to roll out the ability to limit who can reply to your tweets. This feature was initially announced way back at CES, and now Twitter is finally ready for people to use it. The company is starting with a "small % globally," so it won't be available to many people to start. Once you have the feature, you will be able to compose a tweet and decide who can reply. The default is everyone, but you can choose "People you follow" or "Only people you mention." This could drastically change the way people use Twitter.


Update 2: Full Rollout

In an official blog post published today, Suzanne Xie, Director of Product Management at Twitter, announced that reply controls are rolling out for all users on iOS, Android, and Twitter.com. As explained by the company, these reply controls can be set before the user sends a tweet. Users can allow everyone to reply, only people they follow to reply, or only specific people they mention to reply. Tweets with the latter two options set will be labeled and the reply icon grayed out for people who can't reply. These tweets can still be seen, retweeted, shared, or liked, though.