What you need to know
- Twitter appears to be testing a new method of limiting who can mention you in a tweet.
- The service has been spotted experimenting with a new feature to allow anyone or just the people you follow to tag your profile.
- Twitter’s new control will let you narrow down the list of users who can interact with you.
Twitter may soon make it difficult to mention someone in a tweet, especially if that user is a stranger with whom you’d like to interact. The micro-blogging platform has been spotted testing a new feature that will allow users to control who can tag them in a tweet.
As spotted by app sleuth Jane Manchun Wong (opens in new tab), the new test provides two options: users can allow either anyone or just the people they follow to @mention them. On the other hand, users can completely turn off mentions from anyone, even users that follow them or those they’ve followed.
It is not clear how wide the test is or when Twitter plans to roll it out to everyone. Android Central has contacted Twitter for comment and will update this article when we receive a response.
If the new feature becomes broadly available, it will complement Twitter’s existing privacy controls. Last July, the social networking service added the ability to untag yourself from conversations you don’t want to participate in. Twitter also introduced a feature in 2020 that allows you to prevent non-followed users from retweeting or replying directly to your tweets.
However, the experimental feature will also limit your interaction with people with whom you might share a common interest.
On the plus side, the ability to control who can mention you in a tweet is a useful feature for minimizing abuse on the platform, particularly for people who are frequently the target of cyberbullying and harassment. While there is already a way to block abusive users, it can become cumbersome when dealing with a large number of trolls. This feature will make that process much easier, assuming it sees a wider release.
