Sometimes you want to see yourself outside. Take control of your mentions and leave a conversation with Unmentioning, now available to everyone on all devices. pic.twitter.com/Be8BlotElX — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 11, 2022 As you can see in this example, if you don’t mention yourself from a conversation you will see that:
Your username has been removed from the original tweet and replies Users will not be able to mention you again in the same reply thread You will no longer be notified of updates to the exchange
Your username will still appear, in text form, in the original tweets you participated in, but you will no longer be an active part of the exchange once the opt-out is activated. The main focus here is to allow users to avoid those dreaded Twitter pileups, where your tweet or profile becomes the focus of rage for many, many users very quickly, which can become overwhelming quickly. It can feel like you’re losing control and out of context – which you probably are on Twitter, and as the responses increase, this can increase anxiety about how you’re being perceived, who’s seeing these responses, what people are saying for you etc. So now you can disassociate yourself from any such engagement and move on from it – as everyone else from Twitter will within hours – and it could also be useful for examples like the one above where people are calling you an idiot for whatever reason and you just don’t have the space to deal with it. Essentially, it’s the same as the ‘Untag from photo’ option available in various social networking apps, but for chats, which gives users the ability to distance themselves from any direct association with selected Tweet conversations, helping to manage within their application experience. While applicable, it can also be seen by some as ignoring critical interactions and potentially avoiding accountability for your comments. And maybe, in some cases, that’s true, but the principle here is that users should be able to decide whether and how to deal with this in the app. Twitter has added a number of safety tools like this in recent months, including tweet audience controls, “Circles” for more private discussion about tweets, a safety feature, Communities, and more. Each of these tools provides more ways for users to manage their in-app experience. And while they also feel a little alien to Twitter, which has always been about open discussion, the main point, again, is that they’re putting more power in the hands of users, which could help improve people’s experiences.
