Twitter has been making moves in an attempt to improve user experience and overall safety, and its latest feature could do that in a game-changing way.
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The company has unveiled an “unmention” feature to all users, which will allow account holders to remove their handles and mentions from conversations they no longer wish to be tagged in. Previously, users could only “mute” the conversation so they wouldn’t receive notifications, but could not “untag” themselves from annoying threads.
“Sometimes you want to see yourself out,” the company announced via its Twitter Safety account. “Take control of your mentions and leave a conversation with Unmentioning, now rolling out to everyone on all devices.”
Related: What Is Going on With Elon Musk and Twitter?
In order to use the feature, Twitter users can pull up any Tweet that they are mentioned in and select the little three dots and select “get you out of this conversation” where a pop-up menu will appear.
The menu tells users that their usernames will still remain on the Tweet but that it will untag them from the original Tweet and will not alert them of any replies.
The feature will also prohibit users who have untagged themselves in a tweet from ever being tagged in that thread again as well as no longer receiving any notifications from the post or its thread.
Users are then prompted one more time if they want to leave the conversation or stay before it becomes permanent.
“Unmentioning” puts the power back into the individual user, whereas previously there was no way to remove yourself from a conversation entirely other than muting the convo or blocking the original Tweeter, which effectively just shields the user from seeing and interacting with the conversation but doesn’t take them out of it.
Last September, Twitter introduced Safety Mode in order to help its users find a way to combat “unwelcome interactions”.
When a user toggles Safety Mode on, the social media platform will automatically block accounts for one week that exhibit red-flag-worthy behavior such as the use harsh or harmful language or continuously replying and mentioning accounts that don’t respond.
“We want you to enjoy healthy conversations, so this test is one way we’re limiting overwhelming and unwelcome interactions that can interrupt those conversations,” Jarrod Doherty, Sr. Product Manager at Twitter said at the time of the company’s push to focus on user safety. “Our goal is to better protect the individual on the receiving end of Tweets by reducing the prevalence and visibility of harmful remarks.”
Many of these are thought to come from bot and spam accounts, which Elon Musk talked about removing in his quest to acquire the company which was terminated late last week.
Twitter was up over 4% as of Tuesday afternoon a 24-hour-period following last weekend’s bombshell news about the death of the Musk deal.
