Twitter is working on a new feature that will allow users to unmention themselves from other peoples’ tweets.
Dominic Camozzi, a privacy designer at Twitter, shared screenshots of how the feature may work to get feedback before pushing it live.
The idea is to let Twitter users control unwanted attention with the option to untag themselves from conversations they don’t want to be involved in.
Here’s a look at the early concepts.
Unmention Yourself On Twitter
Twitter users will soon have a quick and easy way to untag their account from a tweet they don’t want to be associated with.
In Twitter’s early design, users can tap the three-dot menu icon at the top of a tweet they’re mentioned in and select “Unmention yourself from this conversation.”
The link to the user’s Twitter profile will be removed from the tweet and they won’t be bothered by it again.
Manage Mentions From People You Don’t Follow
When users are mentioned in tweets by accounts they don’t follow they’ll get a special notification.
Users will then have the option to unmention themselves by tapping “Unmention yourself” from the notifications tab.
When this option is selected the person who posted the tweet won’t be notified about the untagging.
If users choose to unmention themselves from tweets by people they don’t follow, the author will not be able to mention that user again in the future.
Proactively Prohibit Mentions
Users will be able to proactively control their mentions by restricting certain accounts from a new settings screen.
There will also be an option to only allow mentions from people the user follows.
For ultimate peace and quiet, users can even pause all mentions from everyone for a set period of time.
If selecting the option to pause all mentions, users can choose intervals of one day, three days, or seven days.
Control Mass Mentions
Lastly, Twitter wants to put safeguards in place for occasions when users receive a mass amount of mentions all at once.
Twitter will first alert the user when they’re getting a lot of mentions. This alone can be helpful for people who have push notifications turned off for mentions.
The alert will indicate how many tweets the user has been mentioned in and by how many users. From there they can review the tweets and choose to take action if necessary.
This may be the time when the ability to pause all mentions will be most helpful.
Availability
It’s not yet known when unmentioning will become available, though it’s certain to be rolled out at some point when Twitter feels it’s ready to launch.
Since the purpose of previewing this feature is to gather feedback, the final product may differ from what’s shown in these screenshots.
Currently the only ways of dealing with unwanted attention on Twitter are to block an account, make your own account private, or selecting the option to “mute this conversation.”
Neither of those solutions are ideal when all you want to do is untag yourself from a tweet. And muting a conversation doesn’t remove the mention, it just prevents further notifications.
Users can untag themselves from photos on Twitter, so it would be fitting if they could also untag themselves from regular tweets.
Source: Dominic Camozzi
