The Twitter weekend starts in the best possible way and, after starting a partial roll-out for an important functionality in terms of accessibility, has begun to publicly test the function to remove itself from unwanted discussions.
Recently, Twitter has attracted media attention thanks to the decision of Elon Musk (who could run into new problems with the SEC, the American Consob, having used the form dedicated to passive investors instead of the one for active investors) to buy the 9.2% of the share package of the microblogging platform which, on a more concrete and immediate level, has just released some interesting news in favor of its users.
The first news on Twitter concerns the launch of a test of the “Unmentioning” functionality, already discovered in the past by the investigative activity of the leaker Jane Manchun Wong, which allows you to “unsubscribe” from a discussion in which you have been mentioned, perhaps because the plaintiff has acted for the purpose of spamming, or because the discussion no longer interests, or simply because the same is taking a bad turn and, therefore, to use an expression of the platform itself, the user intends to protect their peace / calm.
To use the function in question, which according to the official Twitter Safety account has been activated to a certain number of users on the web based iteration (i.e. accessible via browser) of the social network, you need to go to the menu that opens at the top right of each tweet and, among the available options (mute the discussion, follow or mute the author, etc), choose “Abandon this conversation”.
At this point you will arrive in an explanatory window in which it is clarified that, by proceeding, you will no longer receive notifications from that discussion, that it will be impossible to be mentioned again, and that the link to your username will be removed (which will remain as a mere non-clickable placeholder ) in the discussion in question. Read the various points of the functionality, the user will be asked to confirm his choice, before being “un-mentioned” from the discussion he wanted to dissociate himself from.
After an adequate period of testing, Twitter has also started to release another function, in a stable but limited way (to 3% of accounts), in its versions for Android, iOS and web, in favor of the visually impaired or blind, which it involves the descriptive text of the images. Specifically, a guide has been made available that explains to users how to add this text (no more than 1,000 characters), when they upload an image, by selecting the “add description” item, so that it appears at the bottom left on the published photo, the “Alt” button. By pressing or clicking this button, the descriptive text will appear, which you can “feed” to the speech synthesizer usually used on your tablet, smartphone or computer.