What is Twitter's new Safety Mode? How does Safety Mode work?

Among social networking platforms, Twitter is one of the few that still allows you to reach people without paying a dime. Unfortunately, this means people can contact you even if you don't want to.

While many people use Twitter to connect with like-minded people, improve their career prospects, and take advantage of the Internet, others use the platform for nefarious purposes. Over the years, many Twitter users have felt unsafe with various types of unwanted interactions, from stalking to annoying harassment.

Twitter is trying to make these unpleasant experiences a thing of the past with the new Safety Mode feature. Here's how it works:

What is Safety Mode?

In September 2021, Twitter announced that it was testing a new Safety Mode feature to reduce disruptive interactions. At the time of writing, Twitter is rolling out the feature to a small group of users across iOS, Android, and Twitter.com.

Using Safety Mode, you can temporarily block an account for up to 7 days, if it uses harmful or harassing language. This includes things like unwanted mentions or replies. While Twitter hasn't released a full list of problematic terms, it's interesting to speculate how Twitter might handle the review system.

From the initial visualization, it seems that Safety Mode is a general feature that you can turn on to automatically block accounts. You can also see which Twitter accounts have automatically blocked you. According to Twitter, the platform's technology looks at existing relationships, so you won't need to worry about automatically blocking the wrong people you interact with frequently.

Finally, Twitter will also send you a summary notice before the 7-day Safety Mode period ends. That way, you can decide whether to block someone permanently.

How Safety Mode works

While there's still no announcement about the rollout of Safety Mode, there's a lot of potential for this new feature. Users often report increasing problems on social networking sites such as bots, online threats, etc. Safety Mode can help protect users from these dangers, minimizing harassment personal harassment and avoid organized attacks from large-scale hacker groups. A 7-day pause can cause an attacker to abandon the target.

In addition to the existing ways to protect yourself on Twitter, Safety Mode serves as a fine line between doing nothing and completely blocking users. You can think of it acting like a virtual timeout for users to consider before deciding to completely block someone. One thing is for sure, many users will benefit from Safety Mode.

David Pac

Update 10 September 2021