Earlier this year, Twitter announced several new features in the testing stages, aiming to reshape the look and environment of their platform. In line with their efforts to be more transparent, Twitter has taken to publicize their new features during the development stages to receive feedback from users.
A new feature that caught our attention was the ability to unmention yourself from a conversation. The feature was originally exposed to the public by @Dominic Camozzi, a Privacy Designer @Twitter, on June 15th.
According to Dominic, the goal is to create “concepts that could help control unwanted attention on Twitter,” which as anyone who managed a professional Twitter account knows – is a real and pervasive issue.
Other features in development to support this goal include notification when someone you don’t follow @mentions you, restricting certain accounts from @mentioning you, proactively controlling mentions (with options for 1, 3, or 7 days) and notifications when you receive a lot of mentions, among other.
NB: All Tweets on Twitter are still public. Any mentions you receive are from a post that other users created. Currently, there is no feature that allows you to completely remove @mentions from the platform created by others.
Although the end goal is understandable, along the way, Twitter is taking more and more control away from the writer and placing it with the subject of the conversation.
Why should you care?
Social media captivates the public because of the ability to publicly state ones opinion on anything, not despite it. This complete transparency lets users know that when they search for an honest opinion – they get it.
We are a generation of users who have grown up with social media and product reviews. We are jaded: we have learned to disregard comments that appear to be written by a person having a bad day, a competitor, or someone who is just plain sour.
Through our work at Cognis, a company specializing in marketing for High-Tech Startups, an essential part of our social media work is to monitor chatter and sentiment towards our clients’ social media activity.
We sure are familiar with people that go online to write mean or untrue comments about a Startup. We see trolls often in our line of work – it comes with the territory. Do we sometimes wish we could delete an untrue or detrimental comment? Sure. But what would the online world look like if you can’t trust the voice of the people?
Perhaps there is a middle path: only being allowed to delete a certain amount of mentions or banning a certain number of accounts from mentioning you. Almost like analyzing a trimmed mean (excuse us from using a statistical term), it gives the viewers an honest picture overall while placing elements of control in the hand of the subject.
Sara Haider, director of product management at Twitter, said on the Engadget CES 2019 stage, “We have a platform that the world uses to speak their mind; why not use that as part of our development process?” Concisely put. Twitter allows users to speak their minds, won’t restricting this power go against the very nature of Twitter itself?