Twitter Updates Reply Controls to Enable Changes in Who Can Reply After You've Tweeted

Twitter has updated its reply control settings, which it first rolled out in August of last year, to allow users to specify who can react to their postings. As you can see, Twitter's original change allowed users to pick who may react to their tweets during the tweet creation process - 'Everyone,' 'People you follow,' or 'Only people you mention.' The difficulty with it is that you could wish to update your audience in retrospect, perhaps because you received hate in your responses or accidentally sparked an argument with your original comment.

In such circumstances, you could simply delete the tweet, but Twitter has now added retrospective audience control options to the mix, allowing you to restrict or alter who can reply to any of your tweets at any moment, even after you've clicked 'Tweet.' There could be a variety of applications for this. Perhaps your tweet elicits unpleasant or combative answers, and you simply don't have the time to deal with them, or you realize that your comment was more of a statement than a conversation starter, and you'd prefer to turn off the responses.

Again, deleting the original is always an option; however, there are occasions when you want to stand by your comment but don't want to deal with the differing viewpoints. Of course, some may say that you shouldn't be afraid of opposing viewpoints - after all, this is social media, where you should strive to be social in your relationships. However, having options for managing your personal experience and mental health is critical. And you don't always want to deal with the back and forth.

So now you'll have more options for dealing with it, which may not be a revolutionary change but could prove to be really advantageous in a variety of ways. Transparency and openness are crucial in many situations, but your personal mental health is also important. It's something to keep in mind as you go through the procedure.