First An Edit Button And Now An Unmention Feature, Twitter Is Finally Growing Up

Twitter may finally be warming up to a couple of long-awaited features users have been clamoring for. Earlier this week Twitter announced its plans to test out an edit button on its Twitter Blue paid plan, and now it is saying it will be letting some web users test out an “unmention” feature as well.

Twitter users have been asking for, and at times outright demanding, the social media platform to add an edit button. It can be extremely annoying to type out a tweet, hit send, and then notice you have a typo that you cannot simply fix. Earlier this week Twitter announced that it has been working on an edit button for the last year, but will first place it behind a paywall in the form of its Twitter Blue subscription. Now the social media platform is saying that it is testing out another much-wanted feature, an Unmention option.

The new “unmention” feature began rolling out to select web users recently. It was first dangled in front of users back in June of 2021 by Twitter privacy designer Dominic Camozzi as a “concept” that would allow you to untag your username in a selected thread and keep you from being mentioned again in that particular conversation.

However, just a couple of months later, Camozzi stated that tweeters felt the term “unmention” was confusing, so the term was adjusted and renamed “Leave this conversation”.

Now it seems that Twitter has decided to tweak the name again, as Twitter Safety sent out a tweet saying it was “experimenting with Unmentioning.” The post described the new feature as a way to protect one’s peace and “remove yourself from conversations,” stating it was now available for some users, though only through browser windows. There is no indication of when it be made available on the Twitter app.

All of this oddly coincides with Elon Musk’s recent investment into Twitter when he became the majority stockholder and was appointed to the Board of Directors. Musk has been vocal in the recent past about his viewpoints when it comes to free speech and how Twitter has been handling it on the platform. Around the time of his Twitter stock acquisition, Musk tweeted out two polls. One asked if users believed Twitter rigorously adhered to the principle of free speech, which saw 70.4% saying no. The second poll asked if users wanted an edit button, of which 73.6% voted yes.

In another move by Twitter, developer Kevin Marks said the platform had begun erasing embeds of deleted tweets, leaving only a blank box where the tweet once resided. Before that, if a tweet was embedded on a webpage, the content would remain even if the tweet were deleted.

For now, users will have to wait for a full rollout of the edit button and Unmentioning feature. But it does seem Twitter may finally be taking steps to give the vast majority of its users what they have been asking for in these two features. One could argue that Twitter is only announcing these now because of Musk’s influence, but time will tell just how much say the billionaire will actually have moving forward.