Social Media platform Twitter is working on a feature to restrict who can ‘@’ a user in a tweet, thread, or tag the user in a post.
The test version which was discovered by app researcher and engineer Jane Manchun Wong showed that the feature also allows you to block your mentions completely.
Twitter privacy designer Dominic Camozzi confirmed that the feature is in the works in a now-deleted tweet, and solicited feedback on it from the community.
Letting Twitter users limit who can ‘@’ them would be a pretty fundamental shift in how the platform works, making it so you may not be able to reach out across the platform to a stranger to say hi or point something out to them.
Of course, it could also prevent bullying or harassment campaigns and give marginalized users another tool to protect themselves.
The post by Wong shows controls that let you make it so anyone can mention you (which is how Twitter currently works by default), limit mentions to just the people you follow, or turn them off entirely.
This wouldn’t be the first time Twitter is allowing users narrow down the list of people who can interact with them on the platform.
In 2020, it launched a feature that lets you limit who can reply to a tweet to just the people you follow or to people you’ve mentioned in the tweet, and its recent Twitter Circles feature lets you make it so only a select group of people can see certain tweets.
