Twitter May Announce Anti-Harassment Features in 2020

Over the past few years, Twitter management has made it a priority to be more open about its decision-making and provide more comprehensive road maps as new features and other major changes come to the site. 

In that spirit, Dantley Davis, Twitter’s design and research vice president, released a list of features yesterday evening that he says he’s excited to “explore” in 2020. Those tentative features might include some fundamental changes to how Twitter works, especially how the retweet works and how freely users can pull others into their conversations with or without their permission. 

Although Davis says he’s looking forward to these features coming in 2020, he doesn’t reveal any of them officially. The above features are ideas that we are exploring–explorations and experiments have always been part of our process. If we decide to move forward with any of them, we’ll have more to share. 

He said that the features I’m looking forward to in 2020 will be:
 

• Delete me from this conversation  

• Do not allow RT from this tweet  

• Do not allow people to quote me without my permission  

• Delete this @mention from this conversation  

• Just tweet it to: hashtag, interest, or family. 

Nonetheless, two of these proposals stand out. The first is the ability on your tweet to deactivate a retweet. That might help prevent its spread across the wider Twitter network, in case you’re concerned about malicious people or other bad actors want to boost it as a way to direct negative attention on your way. In other words, it is an anti-harassment feature. Davis mentions that’s the other feature is to prevent other users from mentioning you without your permission.  

Nothing is Final As Yet

That being said, these are not official features as yet, just the brand gurus of Twitter being more vocal about in-progress or just plain innovative ideas, as they have recently been known to do. Davis says Twitter is asking the group for input on what it can prioritize and how to introduce those features securely without messing up certain parts of the app that are running well today.