More control over your conversations: now available in Japan and the US!

To give people more control over their Twitter experience we’ve developed different features over the years – from block, muting keywords and accounts, to notifications filters – so that everyone can tailor their experience to make Twitter work best for them. Earlier this year we started testing a way to give people more control over the conversations they start. Today, we’re expanding this test to Japan and the United States!

With this test, we want to understand how conversations on Twitter change if the person who starts a conversation can hide replies. Based on our research and surveys we conducted, we saw a lot of positive trends during our initial test in Canada, including:

• People mostly hide replies that they think are irrelevant, abusive or unintelligible. Those who used the tool thought it was a helpful way to control what they saw, similar to when keywords are muted.
• We saw that people were more likely to reconsider their interactions when their tweet was hidden: 27% of people who had their tweets hidden said they would reconsider how they interact with others in the future.
• People were concerned hiding someone’s reply could be misunderstood and potentially lead to confusion or frustration. As a result, now if you tap to hide a Tweet, we’ll check in with you to see if you want to also block that account.

These are positive and heartening results: the feature helped people have better conversations, and was a useful tool against replies that deterred from the person’s original intent.

We're interested to see if these trends continue, and if new ones emerge, as we expand our test to Japan and the US. People in these markets use Twitter in many unique ways, and we’re excited to see how they might use this new tool.