INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Last November, Twitter rolled out its Hide Replies feature to all users worldwide
The feature, largely designed to lessen the power of online trolls to disrupt conversations, lets users decide which replies to their tweets
are placed behind an extra click
Today, Twitter is making Hide Replies available to its developer community, allowing for the creation of tools that help people hide the
replies to their tweets faster and more efficiently, says Twitter.
These sorts of tools will be of particular interest to businesses and
brands who maintain a Twitter presence, but whose accounts often get too many replies to tweets to properly manage on an individual basis
With Hide Replies now available as a new API endpoint, developers can create tools that automatically hide disruptive tweets based on
factors important to their customers — like tweets that include certain prohibited keywords or those that score high for being toxic, for
example.
Ahead of today launch, Twitter worked with a small number of developers who are now releasing tools that take advantage of the
added functionality.
Jigsaw, an Alphabet-owned company tackling the worst of the web, has integrated Twitter new endpoint with its
Perspective API, which uses A.I
to score tweets based on their toxicity
The integration will automatically hide replies that exceed a certain toxic threshold (.94), freeing up the time it would otherwise take to
comb through replies manually.
A scripting platform for business workflows, reshuffle, has used the endpoint to develop scripts that detect
and hide replies based on keywords or even by user.
Dara Oladosu, the creator of the popular app QuotedReplies, also used the endpoint to
build a new app called Hide Unwanted Replies
The app today automatically hides replies by keywords or Twitter handles
Soon, it will add support for hiding replies from likely troll or bot accounts — including tweets from user accounts created too recently
or from accounts with few followers.
Hide Replies has been one of Twitter more controversial launches to date, as it could potentially
allow users to silence critics or stifle dissent even when warranted — such as in the case of refuting misinformation or propaganda, for
Others argue it not really helping address online abuse; the abuse still occurs, but in the shadows
One organization even recently leveraged Hidden Replies for a clever online campaign about how domestic violence goes unseen which further
illustrates this problem.
Nevertheless, adoption of Hide Replies is growing, with organizations like the CIA even leveraging it on some
tweets.
The new Twitter API endpoint for Hide Replies is available today to all developers in a production-ready form, Twitter says,
initially through Twitter Developer Labs
This program launched last year to serve as a way for developers to try out Twitter latest APIs ahead of their wider release and offer
Participation in Twitter Developer Labs is free, but interested developers have to sign up using an approved developer account
Twitter is also inviting developers building with the new endpoint to collaborate with the company by way of the community forums.
Based on
early feedback from the first testers, Twitter says it already making a few changes to the endpoint including support to unhide replies via
the endpoint, a higher rate limit to support high-volume use cases, and a way to retrieve a list of replies that indicate if they&re hidden
