Starting next week, Twitter will roll out a new feature for its users in Canada, allowing them to hide some responses to their tweets. The hidden responses won’t appear in the main thread of the post but would be visible if a user clicks a button to see them. A senior Twitter Canada executive said: “The hidden replies will always be available — everybody will be able to see them and they will also be able to interact with them, but they won't be a part of the original tweet and the original thread.”
The feature is very different from muting, where users can avoid seeing content from certain accounts, hashtags, and replies, and blocking, where a user is prevented from seeing tweets or interactions with one account. Twitter isn’t putting any timeline on when the experiment will end or when it will be rolled out for other countries.
Users outside Canada won’t be able to use the feature themselves but would be affected when it’s used by someone in Canada. Media reports pointed out that the new feature is open to at least two criticisms — one, that it could allow users to hide critical viewpoints or fact-checking of their tweets, and two, that it still forces people to wade through potentially trollish or hateful content in order to hide replies. Twitter has almost 16 million accounts in Canada. Of late, the social media company has been under the lens for not doing enough to police its platform and prevent abuse.
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