Twitter's tool for removing unwanted followers arrives for web users

[bnew]

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The safety-focused feature is rolling out to everyone.

K. ****
@krisholt
October 11th, 2021

Edgar Moran on Unsplash
All Twitter users can now remove a follower without having to block them. The company started testing this option last month, and starting today, everyone will have access to it. To quietly stop someone from seeing your tweets in their feed, go to the Followers tab on your profile, click the three-dot menu next to the user in question and select the "Remove this follower" option.





This is part of Twitter's efforts to reduce harassment on the platform. Blocking someone you don't want to follow you could lead to retaliation from that person via their allies or their secondary accounts after they find out. Cutting them in this fashion and muting them will mean they're none the wiser that they're out of the loop.


This method won't prevent someone you boot from your followers list from seeing your public tweets. Only blocking them or making your account private will do that. Elsewhere, Twitter is testing a Safety Mode, which automatically blocks accounts that use “potentially harmful language.” It's also looking into more ways to filter and limit replies, so it seems the company is making its anti-harassment efforts a bigger priority.

 

[Contrefaire]

This is dumb. All you have to do is block then unblock, it takes two seconds. Also, the mute function has been working just fine. Once again Twitter is doing everything but giving people the one thing they've been asking for, for 15 years: an edit button.

 

[bnew]

This is dumb. All you have to do is block then unblock, it takes two seconds. Also, the mute function has been working just fine. Once again Twitter is doing everything but giving people the one thing they've been asking for, for 15 years: an edit button.

an edit button would ruin a lot of appeal the platform has. people put out statements and it's there until they delete it. not having an edit button forces people to be thoughtful about what they say unless they're naturally reckless.

 

[Contrefaire]

an edit button would ruin a lot of appeal the platform has. people put out statements and it's there until they delete it. not having an edit button forces people to be thoughtful about what they say unless they're naturally reckless.

This has been the common excuse for years but that argument gets deflated when you look at how many other websites (including this one) give users a short window to make changes before a post is permanently marked as edited, or like Youtube, immediately show that a post has been altered, no matter how quickly the edit was made.

If the lack of an edit button forced people to be more thoughtful about what they say Twitter wouldn't be the shyt show it is today.

 

[bnew]

This has been the common excuse for years but that argument gets deflated when you look at how many other websites (including this one) give users a short window to make changes before a post is permanently marked as edited, or like Youtube, immediately show that a post has been altered, no matter how quickly the edit was made.

If the lack of an edit button forced people to be more thoughtful about what they say Twitter wouldn't be the shyt show it is today.

Celebrities and politicians have claimed they were hacked just to avoid owning up to the things they've tweeted. not having an edit button is a crucial feature of the platform. they've more than likely questioned the decision for years and realized that the hardcoded nature of a tweet has a lot of value. tweets are embedded into news articles and other publications with the editorial knowledge that they can't be modified, only deleted.

edit:

 

[Yinny]

I like this feature, low followers and fine with it but also want an edit button- I do enjoy watching hot take idiots get roasted though

 

[bnew]

@Contrefaire

much like the trolling done on thecoli.

 

[Contrefaire]

Celebrities and politicians have claimed they were hacked just to avoid owning up to the things they've tweeted. not having an edit button is a crucial feature of the platform.

Since like you say, celebrities and politicians have already claimed they were hacked, what difference would an edit button make? They're gonna lie and say that shyt regardless. A feature that shows that a tweet has been edited will quickly clear up any confusion. A feature that only allows edits within the first 60-180 seconds after going live would be even better.

They can even have it to where it's something like Wikipedia (and I wanna say the earlier days of Facebook?) where you could see both versions of a post side by side with a few clicks.

they've more than likely questioned the decision for years and realized that the hardcoded nature of a tweet has a lot of value. tweets are embedded into news articles and other publications with the editorial knowledge that they can't be modified, only deleted.

Now this is something I hadn't thought because embedded tweets in news articles etc, really are basically frozen in time at point of capture and even the number of likes and RTs don't transfer.

That being said, a limited edit feature wouldn't exactly end journalism as we know it. Any trustworthy news organization or publication has some kind of editorial staff in charge of fact checking so a tweet that was posted then quickly edited to say something different would be caught easily. Also, not every site uses embedding; oftentimes screenshots are what gets posted, so an edit button still wouldn't exactly change much.

 

[Contrefaire]

@Contrefaire

much like the trolling done on thecoli.

This is pretty silly logic because none of that nonsense would happen like that with a one-minute-to-edit feature. For some reason people always try to use the "but they could edit the tweet and make everyone who RT'd it look stupid/racist/sexist/etc" when that's clearly not the case.

Even on here, people are quick to clock when a thread or reply has been edited to say some wild shyt it didn't originally say.

 

[bnew]

This is pretty silly logic because none of that nonsense would happen like that with a one-minute-to-edit feature. For some reason people always try to use the "but they could edit the tweet and make everyone who RT'd it look stupid/racist/sexist/etc" when that's clearly not the case.

Even on here, people are quick to clock when a thread or reply has been edited to say some wild shyt it didn't originally say.

60-180 seconds is plenty of time to get hundreds or even thousands of likes & retweets when it comes to a platform that has 206 million daily active users.

if politicians or celebrities had to constantly defend the "likes" or retweets they made on an edited tweet it would diminish the appeal of the platforms to them as well. it'd be easy to get anyone caught up in more nonsense controversy than usual.

 

[bnew]

Since like you say, celebrities and politicians have already claimed they were hacked, what difference would an edit button make? They're gonna lie and say that shyt regardless. A feature that shows that a tweet has been edited will quickly clear up any confusion. A feature that only allows edits within the first 60-180 seconds after going live would be even better.

They can even have it to where it's something like Wikipedia (and I wanna say the earlier days of Facebook?) where you could see both versions of a post side by side with a few clicks.



Now this is something I hadn't thought because embedded tweets in news articles etc, really are basically frozen in time at point of capture and even the number of likes and RTs don't transfer.

That being said, a limited edit feature wouldn't exactly end journalism as we know it. Any trustworthy news organization or publication has some kind of editorial staff in charge of fact checking so a tweet that was posted then quickly edited to say something different would be caught easily. Also, not every site uses embedding; oftentimes screenshots are what gets posted, so an edit button still wouldn't exactly change much.

many users don't even make use of wikipedia page history and facebook likely removed the revision feature history because they saw how little it was being used.

 

[bnew]

@Contrefaire




Imagine you’ve just thought of the perfect tweet. You whip out your phone knowing that your followers will love it. It’s witty and topical. But just as you hit the tweet button, you realized that you’ve made a typo. And on Twitter, you don’t have an edit option. You either have to delete the original and create a corrected tweet or respond to the original with a correction.

It’s a topic that comes up every once in a while on Twitter. Sometimes it’s even protested on Twitter through a trending hashtag like #TwitterEditButton. There’s no way that the Twitter team doesn’t know that this is something most Twitter users want, but why won’t they create this functionality for the app?

Early last year, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, answered that question. When Twitter first started, it was an SMS text messaging service. Twitter wants to preserve the feeling of those days, and since you can’t change a text once you send it, the same goes for your tweets. Dorsey also made another important point. If you quote tweet or retweet someone on Twitter, you don’t want that to suddenly change. We all can imagine the fiasco something like that can cause.

However, I think there are a few other arguments to be made that no edit functionality is beneficial to Twitter. Not being able to edit your tweets makes them more credible. You can’t just go back and change it if you say something that is rude, bigoted, or just incorrect and then pretend that you tweeted something else. No edit button makes Twitter as reliable as an email or text message when used as evidence in the court of public opinion or sometimes in the court of law. If they gave us an edit button, then people will just say that that the original tweet that someone took a screenshot of is photoshopped thus lessening the integrity of Twitter’s tweets.

Photoshopping a social media post does happen on Twitter, but it is not as consequential as on other social media platforms because it doesn’t have an edit button. Kylie Jenner had an issue a few months ago when someone photoshopped one of her edited posts. A person changed a caption on one of her posts to suggest that before Kylie edited it the original post said, “Brown skinned girl” just to cause drama. Turns out that wasn’t what her caption said at all. However, it did initially cause her some drama as people didn’t realize at first that the image was photoshopped. Luckily for her, the person didn’t do a good job photoshopping the image, so it was easily debunked. The drama with Kylie wouldn’t happen on Twitter because if the tweet is still online everyone knows exactly what was written. But on Instagram, it’s another story.

Anyone can make up a username and add any photo to a profile on social media. You don’t have to be who your friends and family know you to be in real life online. Twitter is a website that is known for troll and burner accounts. Former Republican congressional candidate, Dean Browning, was accused of using a burner or a sock puppet account when he tweeted, “I’m a black gay guy and I can personally say that Obama did nothing for me…”

Screenshot of Dean Browning's tweet. Source: The New York Times
Browning, obviously not black and married to a woman, attempted to explain the situation as a botched effort to quote one of his supporters. However, this explanation made the matter seem even more suspicious when a person created a video claiming to be “Dan Purdy,” the supposed supporter that Browning was quoting. But internet detectives figured out that the real name of the man in the video is Byl Holte. The Dan Purdy account was suspended from Twitter because it violated the app’s rules. Needless to say, that with all of the other mess and confusion that goes on, Twitter doesn’t need to add editing into the mix.

Screenshot of a tweet with a typo. Source: ifunny
My favorite and final reason why Twitter benefits from no editing is that it adds to Twitter’s virality. Typos can turn a run-of-the-mill tweet into an instant and hilarious viral hit. This happened earlier this month when a person accidentally forgot to add the preposition “with” to her tweet. Twitter is the home of quick quips, so there were many funny replies under the threads in this tweet related to her typo. Sometimes typos can be happy accidents, at least for the people that didn’t make them.

There’s no other social media platform where something like this would happen. I’m sure she noticed the mistake right away, so if there was an edit button the mistake would have been quickly corrected. However, Twitter’s lack of editing added to its culture. Twitter’s vibe is of sarcasm, teasing, and bluntness. You can “join the conversation” but just make sure you tweet what you mean and mean what you tweet. In life, there are some things you can’t take back. A tweet just happens to be one of them.

 

[Cryptocurrency Scarface]

an edit button would ruin a lot of appeal the platform has. people put out statements and it's there until they delete it. not having an edit button forces people to be thoughtful about what they say unless they're naturally reckless.

Terrible take do you know how much of a time wasting drag it is to replicate a post

I try and make an informed post with a video and then I make a mistake whether a badly spelt hashtag a missed hashtag I forgot to tag someone not being able to edit will reduce my reach

if I want to remove a tag for sometime that has already amassed a large number of views

some people use Twitter like IG to promote themselves not for ridiculous hot takes which can be deleted and reposted anyway

screenshotting gets past this bullshyt novelty you’re talking about

a lot of people are saying outrageous things for the sake of going viral

An edit button will reduce inconvenience just like when they allowed more characters

 

[Cryptocurrency Scarface]

60-180 seconds is plenty of time to get hundreds or even thousands of likes & retweets when it comes to a platform that has 206 million daily active users.

if politicians or celebrities had to constantly defend the "likes" or retweets they made on an edited tweet it would diminish the appeal of the platforms to them as well. it'd be easy to get anyone caught up in more nonsense controversy than usual.

People edit shyt in Facebook Instagram and YouTube all the time without these problems

why is Twitter above this shyt???