Twitter plans new privacy-related tools

Bloomberg

Twitter Inc is planning to test new privacy-related features aimed at giving users greater control over their follower lists and who can see their posts and likes, an effort to make people more comfortable interacting and sharing on social network.
The tools are related to what Twitter executives call “social privacy,” or how users manage their reputations and identities on the service. This includes information like a person’s list of followers, the tweets they like, and whether their accounts are public or private.
Among features being considered is ability to edit follower lists, and a tool to archive old tweets so that they’re no longer visible to others after a specific amount of time designated by user. Hiding past tweets could be a popular feature with people who don’t want their posts to exist online forever, offering an easier solution than manually deleting posts or combing through years-old messages to find those you wish you hadn’t sent.
Internal research found that many of Twitter’s users don’t understand the privacy basics, like whether their account is publicly visible, said Svetlana Pimkina, a staff researcher at the San Francisco-based company. Those users engage less on Twitter because they don’t know what other people will be able to see about them.
“When social privacy needs are not met, people limit their self-expression,” Pimkina said. “They withdraw from the conversation.” Twitter will start prompting people to review whether their accounts are public or private beginning in September.
The company’s privacy team is working on several products to assuage this user uncertainty. Some of them will be tested soon, and others are just in the concept stage right now, according to interviews with members of the team.
Part of Twitter’s motivation is that employees often see users do creative workarounds because these features don’t exist, like blocking and then unblocking someone to remove them as a follower. Lots of other users manually delete old tweets, or toggle back and forth between public and private accounts depending on what they’re posting.
Archiving tweets, in particular, could help alleviate fears for people who worry their old posts will come back to haunt them in some way down the road, such as while looking for a new job, applying for college or running for political office. Rival companies like Snap Inc. and Instagram have had success with disappearing Stories products — a signal that users are drawn to apps where their posts won’t exist forever. Twitter’s own Stories feature didn’t catch on with users, but a feature that does the same with tweets would likely be popular among users.
Twitter has long been open about its product road map, and often tests features that aren’t fully launched. But the company also talks a lot about ideas in concept, some of which fail to materialize, or take much longer than expected.
Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said in March that Twitter has moved too slowly in recent years to launch new products. He said that rolling out new tools more quickly was now a companywide goal, naming it alongside revenue and user growth targets. Specifically, Dorsey said he wanted to “double the number of features per employee that directly drive” either user growth or revenue. A company spokeswoman declined to share the company’s progress on that goal.
This public expectation has created a new mindset and culture internally, employees say. “We are becoming more metrics-driven in how we think about these things,” said Damien Kieran, Twitter’s chief privacy officer. “I think that’s helping us iterate and move quicker.”