Twitter now lets you silence your reply guys after a tweet is live

Twitter is making a small adjustment to its safety settings that will allow users to change who is allowed to respond to their tweets after posting.

Now after you share a new post, you can indefinitely adjust which categories of users are allowed to respond to it — be it all Twitter users, just people you follow, or only people you mention in the tweet.

In the past you could only decide who can reply to your tweet before sharing. Twitter allows users to control who can respond to their tweets in order to combat harassment or hate speech.

Harassment prevention — By setting tweets so that only people you follow can reply, users can ensure their posts are still seen by a wide audience, but the area below the tweet isn’t tainted with harmful responses.

With the new change, an author can cut off a discussion if one of their tweets begins getting bombarded with replies that may be hurtful and cause distress. It gives users the option to have a public discussion, but they also retain control if things go sideways when the internet does what it often does, and mob mentality lets someone get hit with a tidal wave of supposed experts needing to supply their unrestrained opinions.

These moderation tools are sometimes used by brands, which may not want NSFW replies being found below their tweets — like the account for Tony the Tiger, which several years ago began blocking users for repeatedly replying to its tweets with sexually charged images of the cereal mascot.

Twitter has tried in recent years to improve safety and wellbeing on the social network, even creating a “healthy conversations” metric in 2018 to measure the quality of discourse on the platform. Twitter being public and anonymous by nature, it was for years synonymous with high-profile users announcing they were leaving the platform after being bombarded with constant targeted hate by the masses.