Twitter created a surprise at CES 2020 by announcing, Wednesday, January 8, that it would now be possible to control who has the right to respond, or not, to his tweets. A measure is taken to avoid cyberbullying.

Four options will soon be offered to tweeters to limit the users authorized to engage in a conversation. Twitter also wants to introduce a more ergonomic threading option.

Control and guide the conversation

In November, the social network with the little blue bird introduced an option to hide unwanted responses to its tweets. Jack Dorsey’s business is taking it to the next level by offering four more advanced options to users.

If the “Global” option will allow anyone to respond, as is currently the case, “Group” will only allow responses from accounts to which the user is subscribed, as well as those from the accounts mentioned or attached through an image or video.

Then, “Panel” will limit the right of reply to only the users mentioned in the initial tweet. Finally, “Statement” will prohibit any conversation in response to a tweet. These options are grouped under the name “Conversation Dynamics”, and we can see a (not final) version of their implementation on the image below.

These new features should enter the test phase during the first quarter of 2020 for a deployment planned later in the year. ” It’s a way to keep control of the conversation and to orient it as you really want,” explains Suzanne Xie, conversation products manager at Twitter, who came to present these new products at the show.

Improved threads

Other improvements are also planned by the social network. Twitter executives said they were working on improving the threading option, by formatting blocks of threads in a cascading view. We had already heard of this option, which recalls how Reddit works.

In addition, Twitter will soon follow, in addition to accounts and hashtags differently, “topics”, through ” a fine data analysis,” said Suzanne Xie. No political subject will be proposed at first.