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Twitter: Don't Mention It…

This article is more than 2 years old.

Twitter has announces a feature that will allow you to un-mention yourself, that is, to remove unwanted mentions that other users make of your account by inserting a particular topic in your timeline and thus gaining extra attention. 

This is not about somebody mentioning you to tell you something, to comment on a topic they know you are interested in or to start a conversation, all perfectly legitimate uses, but instead is about using mentions as a spam tool, one of the most common abuses on Twitter: putting a list of accounts behind a tweet with a high number of followers is unfortunately very common, but feeds off the popularity of these accounts and leverages their number of followers to give the topic an artificially greater diffusion.

In fact, Twitter itself has long included a category within the option to report a tweet that refers precisely to using mentions for spamming, but until now it was limited to deleting the tweet from your timeline. The new feature increases the control that users have over their timeline, and above all, that their account is not associated with certain causes or topics with which, if they were interested, they could associate themselves, without being “forced” by a third party. It is also possible to block anybody who regularly misuses your account, but blocking, in many cases, is too drastic an option.

A fundamental rule of social networks, not to feed off the popularity of others, which many people still ignore with tweets that, in addition, sometimes go viral, which means you spending a whole day receiving tweets about something of no interest to you. In many cases, users with a large number of followers considered this misuse simply part of the rules of the game or a cost of popularity or leadership. But for others, it was an annoying misuse.

Twitter has been introducing new features for some time now, many of them related either to monetizing itself or its users (Superfollows, Tips, Twitter Blue) or giving them more control, all of which reflect a pro-active approach by the company that is to be welcomed.

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