Today is Safer Internet Day, a global initiative to promote a safer internet for all users, especially young people. To mark the occasion, Twitter has launched an emoji (activated by Tweeting #SaferInternetDay) to encourage people to join the conversation on Internet safety.
Whether you’re a football fan or an Afrobeats stan, a pop culture addict or a news buff, you come to Twitter to be a part of the conversation. Sometimes, those conversations can get heated. To mark Safer Internet Day, we’ve pulled together a guide to Twitter’s safety tools so you can feel safer when participating in the conversation, manage your digital footprint, and control your experience on the platform.
Reporting a Tweet isn’t the end of the line – there’s a lot of additional safety features to help you protect yourself:
- Block: Get rid of negativity – you can restrict specific accounts from contacting you, seeing your Tweets, and following you. Learn more about Block here.
- Mute: Don’t want to see it? Minimise unwanted noise by removing an account’s Tweets from your timeline without unfollowing or blocking it. You can also mute particular words, conversations, phrases, usernames, emojis, or hashtags. Learn more here
- Remove Followers: Curate your own follower list. Without directly Blocking someone, you can tap through to your list of Followers and actively remove that person from following you.
- Sensitive Media: NSFW? Twitter’s default setting is to place potentially sensitive material behind a warning. You can check this or opt into viewing this media by adjusting your settings.
Control your conversations and DMs:
- Hide Replies: Sometimes replies can get a little out of control. You choose who gets visibility in your conversations. If you believe a reply is off-topic or spammy and detracts from the conversation, you can click on the reply and hide it. Replies are not deleted but placed behind an extra click. Learn more here.
- Conversation Controls: Not everyone has to be in every conversation, and you can control who can reply to your Tweet at any time. This feature can help you proactively manage a conversation without having to use Block and can prevent spam. Check out our guide to conversation settings here.
- My DMs: You choose who can slide into your DMs. DM settings allow you to filter out unwanted messages and limit messages from people you don’t follow. More info here.
Manage your digital footprint and keep yourself and your data safe:
- 2FA: Keep your account safe. Add an extra layer of security for your account that allows you to add a further security check in addition to your password. You can learn how to set it up here.
- Protecting your Tweets: The whole world doesn’t have to know your thoughts. Keep things private by choosing to make your Tweets visible only to your followers. You’ll receive a request whenever someone wants to follow you. Find out how here.
- Discoverability: Keep IRL friends and internet friends separate. When someone new joins Twitter, your account may be suggested for them to follow if they, and Twitter, have access to your email and/or phone number. If you don’t want to be suggested to new accounts based on this data, you can disable your discoverability. Get all the details here.
Our work to promote healthy and inclusive conversations is ongoing. We’re continuing to test new features like Safety Mode, which aims to reduce disruptive interactions, and prompts that encourage people to reconsider a potentially harmful reply. To learn more about safety on Twitter, follow @TwitterSafety and check out Twitter’s Digital Safety Playbook.
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