Twitter's Privacy Feature Plans Include Option to Hide Your Old Tweets

Twitter is planning new privacy-related features that provide users with greater control over follower lists and who can see their posts and likes, reports Bloomberg.

The plans are said to include an option to archive old tweets so that other users can't see them after a set period of time designated by the account holder (such as 30, 60, or 90 days, or a whole year), as well as the ability to edit follower lists.

According to Bloomberg, the plans are an effort to make people more comfortable interacting and sharing on Twitter, and are related to what Twitter executives call "social privacy," or how users manage their identities and reputations on the social network.

Internal research at the company reportedly found that many Twitter users don't understand the privacy basics, like whether their account is private or public, which causes them to engage less on the social network because they don't know what other people will be able to see about them.

To counter this, Twitter will start prompting users to review whether their accounts are public or private beginning in September. Its privacy team are also working on other potential changes including the ability to remove followers (as opposed to blocking them), hide liked tweets, and remove oneself from a public conversation.

Twitter has no timeline for some of the changes, while some features, like the archive option, are still in the "concept phase," but Twitter plans to let people remove followers starting this month, and to let users remove themselves from conversations by the end of the year.