Twitter will test reply limiting feature to beat back trolls

Twitter is trying to make it a lot harder for trolls to hijack conversations.

The company will start testing a new feature that will allow users to set limits on who can reply to their tweets beforethey hit send. The feature, which the company plans to test in a limited rollout later this year, marks one of the company's most aggressive efforts to fight trolls and targeted harassment on its platform.

With this new feature, Twitter users will be able to choose who can reply to their tweets from a list of options that include: everyone, only followers, only people who are mentioned in the tweet, or nobody.

Twitter's latest conversational experiment. Credit: twitter

If the account is public, the tweet will still be visible to everyone on Twitter, but only the selected audience will be able to reply. That said, anyone will be able to quote-tweet if the account is public.

"It allows us to create a whole new format for conversation that didn't exist before," Twitter's director of product for conversations, Suzanne Xie, said during a press event at CES.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

The move is Twitter's latest, and perhaps boldest, experiment improving "conversational health" on its platform. The company previously introduced the ability to hide replies, but it still required users to manually hide each unwanted reply, which isn't exactly practical if hundreds of people are jumping into the conversation.

For Twitter users who often become targets of abuse and harassment, the ability to limit replies could have a dramatic impact on their experience as it could prevent their conversations from getting spammed with unwanted replies. And many Twitter users were quick to praise the experiment as a welcome change.

Still, critics could argue the change could help prevent misinformation from being easily debunked or harm the ability for everyday Twitter users to interact with public figures. But, Twitter says one of the goals of the test is to reduce some of the more unhealthy conversational dynamics that happen on Twitter, like trolls dunking on tweets they dislike or ratio-ing.

"Part of the goal of the experiment is seeing what the outcomes are. How does that influence the ratio situation? How does that influence how people use good conversations?" said Twitter's product lead Kayvon Beykpour.

The feature is, for now, still only a test and will only be accessible to a small group of users. Twitter says it will begin experimenting with the new replies feature sometime in the next couple of months, and that it will be watching closely and looking for feedback before it decides whether to make it available more broadly.