Twitter is rethinking how people interact on its platform in a bid to fight harassment that goes on the social media giant. The company recently announced anti-harassment features it is exploring that may or may not launch next year. They are also experimenting on new features that they hope will promote healthier conversations on the platform but more on that below.
Some of the anti-harassment features include allowing you to disable retweets on your tweet, preventing random users from mentioning your handle and also removing yourself if you have been tagged.
Twitter will now start experimenting by tweaking the functionalities of features like the retweet, quote-retweet and reply hoping that people will use them differently and more constructively.
Twitter will add an emoji to a retweet to give people a chance to quote-tweet without going into the compose field.
Senior directors of product management at Twitter, David Gasca and Suzanne Xie hope that this new feature will make people stop dunking on tweets.
If you like a tweet, you could use the heart-eyes emoji and if you don’t, you choose a red circle with a line through it.
Going with the latter, you will be prompted by Twitter which will ask, “Why do you disagree?” To which Twitter thinks will have the user think hard and post a more courteous reply.
“Everything on our platform incentivizes some form of behaviour – if we modify how people can do retweets, or how people can reply, or how people can engage, how does that change conversation on the platform?” David Gasca said in a Buzzfeed interview.
This idea didn’t bode well with people on Twitter with most of them suggesting Twitter focus on the real issues as emojis are only a band-aid
https://twitter.com/JustAGirl515/status/1192582658385166336
Unless this is going to stop people from having bad ideas online, hard pass https://t.co/29VRlsaHGP
— it’s lawsuit time (@jesseltaylor) November 7, 2019
Their plan is literally “maybe you should use more emojis”? https://t.co/fUmKExWrYQ
— Peter A. Shulman 📚 (@pashulman) November 7, 2019
https://twitter.com/thekarami/status/1192632687602724865
https://twitter.com/ryanlawler/status/1192552047939399698
Hey @Twitter, I like to retweet good content. If you ruin retweets just because you’re unwilling to actually police actual bad behavior, I’m going to quit twitter. https://t.co/CgLfGcLkvA
— Better Urban Planning & Mobility (@UrbanismAvenger) November 8, 2019
What could go wrong?
(JustbanthefuckingNazis) https://t.co/87cMj9VGyt
— Patrick S. Bruck (@PatrickSBruck) November 8, 2019
https://twitter.com/christianmccrea/status/1192591603589730309
https://twitter.com/dylan20/status/1192552657719676928
Twitter: We're gonna make some changes to this here website
Everyone: Are you getting rid of the nazis?
Twitter: Nah, we're gonna take away everything that makes this site fun https://t.co/iWiJ2yuHT3
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) November 7, 2019
