Twitter Testing A ‘Change Who Can Reply’ Feature

Right now, Twitter has a few ways of handling replies to tweets. By default, your tweets can be replied to by everyone, but you can also set it so that only people you follow can reply, or people you tag in the tweet can reply. Alternatively, you can also create a private Twitter account that more or less guarantees who can see your tweets and who can reply  to it.

However, a tweet by researcher Jane Manchun Wong has revealed that Twitter is working on a new feature called “Change who can reply”. This is a setting that you can change after your tweet has been posted. Not much is known about the feature, but the name of it seems to suggest that you can always change who can reply to that particular tweet you made.

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Twitter is working on the ability to “Change who can reply” after the tweet has been published pic.twitter.com/1upVyafkmS

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 5, 2021

This might be useful at curbing trolls and online harassment. We’ve seen how some tweets have “blown up”, sometimes for the wrong reasons, so allowing users to change who gets to reply to that tweet can be useful. For example, a tweet made by a politician might be getting a lot of unnecessary vitriol that isn’t constructive or helpful, so limiting who can reply to it can cut down on the noise.

There is currently no word on when the feature will be made available as it appears to be in testing right now, but hopefully we’ll have more details about it soon.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Twitter