Twitter is experimenting with a new feature “Audience Control”

Twitter is working on a new toggle called “Audience Control” that will let you choose whether to completely prevent people from mentioning your @handle or only allow those who you follow in the app to do so. This will give you more control over who sees your tweets.

As you can see in the tweet shared below by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong. The new option, which Twitter is currently experimenting with, would give users more control over how people can interact with their tweets.

The “Allow Others to Mention you” toggle at the top would prevent people from using your @handle at all.

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This would presumably simply disable any mention of your handle, similar to Twitter’s recently introduced “Unmention” feature, which enables you to leave Twitter chats that you no longer wish to participate in.

As you can see in this illustration, if you select to leave a conversation using this option, your handle link within that thread is subsequently disabled. After that, people may still use your handle, but it won’t link to your profile and you won’t be informed of it.

You could probably not stop people from using your @handle in their tweets, but it would no longer be an active mention as such if you chose to prevent others from mentioning you at all using this new toggle.

Additionally, a new option has been added that allows you to restrict mentions to only people you follow on the app.

Over the past year and a half, Twitter has introduced a number of audience control tools for tweets, including unmentioned, as previously mentioned, as well as restricted replies, Twitter Circles for private group chats, Safety Mode, which automatically blocks spammy or abusive replies, and Communities for closed, topical discussions.

Together, these factors may significantly alter how Twitter operates, moving it away from its “global town square” model, which gives everyone a chance to participate in topical discussions, and toward a more compartmentalized collection of interesting but segregated tweet chats.

All of these features were added by Twitter to help users avoid the drawbacks of public posting. Many users choose not to express their opinions on the app out of concern that they might be “canceled” if they say something inappropriate.