Twitter announced Wednesday it is testing a feature that will alert users that a conversation could be "heated" or "intense." In a tweet, the company described the experiment as "a work in progress as we learn how to better support healthy conversation."
Twitter has introduced and tested a range of features intended to try to help users have a more positive experience on the site, including a prompt that asks users if they want to read articles before retweeting them and a new setting called "Safety Mode" that temporarily blocks accounts for seven days that may have used harmful language (if the user opts for that setting).
Twitter did not specify in this case how it will determine whether conversations or posts could qualify as either heated or intense, and how it will evaluate the success of the test. "This is the first exploration into more context about a conversation's vibes, so you can be informed before you join. This is a small limited experiment on iOS and Android and we will be learning and iterating as we monitor the results of the initial experiment," a Twitter spokesperson wrote in a statement to Protocol.