Similarly, a ‘View Hidden Tweets’ feature was also found, which allows the users to unhide the previously hidden tweets by the original tweet poster. The new Twitter feature was first found by Jane Manchun Wong, who tweeted about the feature on Thursday. According to Wong, she found the feature hidden within the code of Twitter Android application. Later, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed the news that the feature was truly being developed by the company.
However, till now the function of the Hide Tweet button was unclear – we were not sure if the button would hide the tweet from everyone’s view or just from the person who had clicked the hide button. If the former was true, then there it could be a serious issue as people could hide their suspicious and offending tweets from everyone’s views. On Thursday, Twitter Senior PM Michelle Yasmeen Haq posted an explanation about what the Hide Tweet feature is all about and what would it do.
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) February 28, 2019 She wrote: We often hear from heavy Tweeters that they want to be able to protect their conversations… People who start interesting conversations on Twitter are really important to us, and we want to empower them to make the conversations they start as healthy as possible by giving them some control. We think of conversations as an ecosystem of different groups: authors, repliers, the audience and the platform. We try to balance the experience across all four groups, and we are continuously exploring ways to shift the balance without overcorrecting. We already see people trying keep their conversations healthy by using block, mute, and report, but these tools don’t always address the issue. Block and mute only change the experience of the blocker, and report only works for the content that violates our policies. With this feature, the person who started a conversation could choose to hide replies to their tweets. The hidden replies would be viewable by others through a menu option. We think the transparency of the hidden replies would allow the community to notice and call out situations where people use the feature to hide content they disagree with. We think this can balance the product experience between the original Tweeter and the audience. In the coming months, we plan to start testing this publicly so stay tuned for more and keep telling us what you think! Twitter has already been under constant pressure from fans and critics alike and most agree that it needs to improve its overall conversational health on the platform. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a recent interview said that Twitter was looking into new ways to proactively enforce and promote health. That’s why blocking or reporting a user or tweet was last resorts. It should also be kept in mind that Twitter tests a lot of new things and features that they never implement on the actual public platform. So, only time will tell when the company will implement the new feature on the actual social platform.
