Twitter is testing auto-hiding of DMs that may be hurtful

Twitter is working on a new functionality to ensure that unwanted direct messages do not reach the recipient. The filtered messages can still be viewed via a button, and can also easily be removed from there.

In a fairly short video, posted on Twitter itself, you can see what the new function will look like. There’s little accompanying text, but the company behind the social networking site says it’s running a test to automatically hide unwanted messages. For example, Twitter users should be less harassed by people who send hurtful DMs.

If you still want to see the automatically filtered messages, you have to go to ‘message requests’, which contains the DMs of people who are not followed by the user. There is a button to show additional messages, which are the automatically filtered out messages. The content of supposedly hurtful messages seems to have been automatically removed from there, while other unwanted DMs, such as spam, can still be read. Also included is a button to delete the filtered out comments.

It is unclear how long the test will take and whether or not Twitter will decide whether or not to implement the functionality. Twitter has long been inventing ways to counter negative and hurtful messages.