Twitter is giving brands and users more control over their social narratives with the ability to hide Tweet replies. The feature is rolling out globally after months of testing in some countries, including Canada and the U.S. Twitter made the announcement via a blog post on Thursday.
“Currently, repliers can shift the topic or tone of a discussion and derail what you and your audience want to talk about,” the company said. “We learned that the feature is a useful new way to manage your conversations.”
How it works. Users can opt to hide replies to the tweets they create. However, users can still see and engage with hidden replies by selecting the “View hidden replies” option in the Tweet’s dropdown.
A Tweet author also has the option to unhide all replies – or a single reply – at any time. When a Tweet author hides a reply, the author of the reply will not be notified.
Why we should care. When the feature was still in beta, Twitter said it found that the majority of users hid replies that they believed to be irrelevant, off-topic, and “annoying.”
For brands, the ability to hide Tweet replies could help give them more control over the context of their engagements – such as weeding out spam replies. On the other hand, hiding all replies could have a negative impact for users who rely on replies to find out more information about the product or topic discussed.
How it’s available. The hide replies feature is now available globally for all Twitter users on iOS, Android, and desktop, but is not currently available on Tweetdeck. The feature marks another step by Twitter to continue cleaning up its content ecosystem by providing more controls for users.
