Twitter Updates Direct Messages To Discourage Abuse And Trolling

A new Twitter policy change will make it harder for unwanted users to slide into your direct messages. Twitter announced Tuesday users with open direct messages will now get messages from users they don’t follow in a secondary folder.

Twitter announced the news in a tweet:

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The new feature will launch as part of a rolling update — as of this writing, Twitter’s Apple iOS and web clients had yet to be given the secondary tab.

As part of the update, messages from nonfollowers will be sent to a secondary Requests tab. Here, you’ll be able to see all the messages that come from general users and choose whether to approve or ignore their requests. When you accept the message, the user will be able to message you normally and won’t know whether you’ve accepted or ignored the message.

The update puts Twitter in line with other social media services like Facebook. The social media network has long had a secondary inbox for users that allows them to receive messages that aren’t from friends or people they don’t know directly. For Twitter, the feature is also a way to encourage more users to enable direct messaging. Currently, Twitter only allows either open messages that go into a single inbox or messages exclusively from users you follow, which limits the feature’s scope.

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It’s also a helpful way to discourage harassment from trolls and other negative users on Twitter. The service has had its struggles in trying to deal with targeted abuse from trolls and the messaging update is another way to help users automatically filter out unwanted messages without having to deal with them directly.

The minor update also comes as Twitter looks to expand its video offerings significantly. Within the past few months, Twitter has invested heavily in live video and streaming content like sports, esports and news. For the social media network, the move is intended to encourage users to stay within the Twitter ecosystem and tweet, watch video or read tweets for longer periods of time every day. With the updated messaging system, it’ll be a small beneficial way to encourage users to do so.