Twitter Will Let Users Limit or Block Replies to Tweets

(Bloomberg) -- Twitter Inc. is adding another safety control to help curb abuse and harassment on its social network: Users will soon be able to limit the group of people that can reply to their tweets.

When posting a message, users will also be able to choose who can reply: anyone, just their followers, only people mentioned in the tweet, or no one at all, according to The Verge. The feature, announced Wednesday at the CES technology conference in Las Vegas, is an effort to limit harassment and other types of unhealthy interactions between users, a problem Twitter has been working to fix for years.

In November, Twitter gave users the option to hide specific replies to tweets so that others wouldn’t be able to see them, a related feature for fighting abuse on the service. Now it’s taking that a step further with the option to block replies altogether, something it “will be experimenting with” in early 2020, a company spokeswoman said. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has said repeatedly that improving Twitter’s “health” is the company’s top priority.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kurt Wagner in San Francisco at kwagner71@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Robin Ajello

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