Why an upcoming Audience Restricting feature in Twitter is a WRONG move.

Users can control who can reply to their tweets with the upcoming new feature.

Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash

Unlike other social media apps like Instagram, Facebook and  Snap chat, Twitter is a Social media platform where people will mainly communicate, Discuss and have different opinions on a topic rather than just posting photos. But now Twitter is going to restrict how users can reply to others tweets by allowing an individual to mute a specific group of people to not to reply to their tweets.

While twitter considering doing this for sometime, they took this year's CES to announce about this feature, on stage at CES in a presentation Suzanne Xie, director of product management at Twitter, announced this feature by showing photo of this feature in use.

Image shown by Twitter at CES 2020

The feature will not be available for the users right away as Twitter still has some development to do to the feature and beta test it before releasing it to all Twitter users, you can choose your audiences who can reply to your tweet in four options which are Global - means everyone can respond to your tweet by replying to you, Group - people who you follow and mention in your tweet will be able to reply you, Panel - Only people who you tagged in the tweet can reply you and Statement - which means no one can reply to your tweet other than you.

What's wrong with this feature?

You'll be able to control these settings right from where you compose your tweets, this feature may favor the users who are facing Cyber bullying but on the other side people can just get away with what ever they say by limiting even the fair criticism, we're currently living in a world where people are easily offended and became sensitive and this feature will perfectly serve those people.

Some people with no proper knowledge may get misinformed if they follow a misleading tweet because other users can't shed a light on the misinformation in the tweet. The beauty about the twitter is the conversation that people can have, users can correct someone if they're wrong but's that no longer can happen if someone wants to turn a blind eye on other's opinions.

Some Twitter users have responded to the news and they're not happy with what Twitter was doing with this feature, an Twitter user twitted saying 

yo
I cant wait for that new Twitter feature.
make locked tweets all the time so NO ONE CAN COMMENT ON MY SHITTY TAKES.
Hell yes.
I shall make you all suffer~

— 🇭🇰Hella Ass Claps🇭🇰 (@MSharkess) January 9, 2020

Although the above tweet was in a much lighter sense but this is what probably will happen after this new feature is released for all Twitter users, It's okay to have different opinions and views but muting the people who disagree with you will do no favor, Users(Especially verified users) on twitter can make dumb statement without full knowledge and can get away with it.

Because there will be no one to correct it, the result of this will be people who got more likes or retweets to their tweets will be the one who are right because you can't know the problem with that particular tweet because their are no replies to the tweet since they are disabled.

It will take some time until this new feature will be available to the public, Twitter considering beta testing this feature in first quarter of this year.

I wish Twitter will revert it's decision to include this feature in Twitter but it is less likely to happen. Whenever I see a feature like disabling comments on other platforms like YouTube or Instagram I never thought it would be available on twitter one day, because it is one of the basic features of this Social media platform but here we are, everyone wants to live in their own bubble.

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