Twitter is working on a way to control who mentions you - The Verge

Twitter has confirmed that it’s working on a feature that lets you limit who’s able to mention you or turn off people’s abilities to mention you completely.

The Verge homepageThe Verge homepageThe VergeThe Verge logo./Tech/Reviews/Science/Entertainment/MoreMenuExpandThe VergeThe Verge logo.MenuExpandTwitter/Tech/PolicyTwitter is working on an official don’t @ me featureTwitter is working on an official don’t @ me feature / A test of the feature lets you allow mentions from anyone, only people you follow, or nobody at allBy Mitchell Clark

Share this storyKeep my name out of your tweet. Illustration by Alex Castro / The VergeTwitter is working on a feature that lets you control who can mention you, with the test version discovered by app researcher and engineer Jane Manchun Wong letting you block mentions completely. Twitter privacy designer Dominic Camozzi confirmed that the feature is in the works in a now-deleted tweet, and solicited feedback on it from the community.

Letting Twitter users limit who can @ them would be a pretty fundamental shift in how the platform works, making it so you may not be able to reach out across the platform to a stranger to say hi or point something out to them. Of course, it could also prevent bullying or harassment campaigns and give marginalized users another tool to protect themselves.

The screenshot posted by Wong shows controls that let you make it so anyone can mention you (which is how Twitter currently works by default), limit mentions to just the people you follow, or turn them off entirely.

This wouldn’t be the first time Twitter’s letting users narrow down the list of people who can interact with them on the platform. In 2020, it launched a feature that lets you limit who can reply to a tweet to just the people you follow or to people you’ve mentioned in the tweet, and its recent Twitter Circles feature lets you make it so only a select group of people can see certain tweets.