Twitter to Introduce New 'Hide Replies' Feature in June to Help Users Fight Online Abuse

Twitter has announced that it will start experimenting with a new feature that will let users hide replies to their tweets. The experimental feature, which was originally revealed in February this year, will go live in June. 'Hide Replies' will allow the original author of a tweet to hide some replies that may seem inappropriate, removing them from the conversation view entirely. This is the first time Twitter will allow users to exercise some level of control over replies to their tweets.

Twitter's new feature will be tweaked based on user feedback since it'll be an experiment for the social networking giant. As of now, Facebook allows users to delete other users' comments from their thread. Twitter users don't have much control over replies posted by other users.

While on one hand, the new 'Hide Replies' feature will help Twitter users hide abusive or spammy replies from showing up on the conversation views, it could also be misused to mute others' opinions even when they're genuine.

However, the new feature doesn't really enable users to delete replies. The users can simply hide them, making them a little harder to access. The move is seen as an effort to push people away from trolling others on the social platform.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Twitter shared the progress it has made so far in fighting abuse and spam on its platform. Twitter says 38 percent of the abusive content that's enforced is now being handled proactively by the company's teams, instead of relying on others to report them.

Twitter says it has suspended 100,000 accounts for creating new accounts after they were suspended during the first three months of 2019, a sharp 45 percent rise from the same quarter last year. Twitter says its response rate has grown 60 percent faster, thanks to the new in-app appeals.

The social networking giant says it is using the same technology used to track spam to help flag abusive content on its platform. It is then manually reviewed by dedicated teams. The company has also expanded its review teams across the globe to help flag and bury abusive content.

In the coming months, Twitter says it will improve the technology that helps it review content so that its teams can take action quickly. The company is also looking to weed out content that includes private information, threats, and other forms of online abuse.

As for the 'Hide Replies' feature, it could be scrapped or tweaked based on how users respond. As we mentioned earlier, Twitter will start offering the feature from June this year.