1

We want to help people feel safe and comfortable having conversations on Twitter. As part of that, today we’re excited to give Tweet authors more control over the conversations they start by supporting the hide replies feature with a new endpoint.

Available first in Twitter Developer Labs and ready for production use, you can use this endpoint to build tools that help people hide replies to their Tweets. People hide replies for many reasons, including to remove comments that are abusive, irrelevant, or distracting. The endpoint enables you to build tools to help people on Twitter hide replies faster, more efficiently, or in circumstances where they’d normally give up.

For this launch in Labs, we worked with a few developers to craft tools that will improve the experience of hiding replies for the people who use Twitter.

  • We worked with Jigsaw to integrate this new endpoint with the Perspective API, an artificial intelligence that scores a Tweet for its toxicity, to demonstrate how the endpoint can help hide abusive replies. Through this integration, the endpoint will automatically hide replies to people’s Tweets that exceed a high toxicity threshold (.94). We hope this will remove some of the burden people feel when having to comb through toxic replies to hide them individually. Try the live example in our hide replies endpoint documentation and remix the project to get started with your own idea.

  • We also know that people stop participating in conversations when replies contain certain keywords that they find distracting. Reshuffle, a platform that connects business applications, developed a script to detect and hide replies that include certain keywords. Try it out here and follow these instructions to set it up with your own client app.

  • Dara Oladosu, the developer behind the popular app QuotedReplies, built an app that automatically hides replies that meet some of the criteria that he’s determined are more likely to exhibit abusive behavior, including replies that contain certain keywords he’s muted in the past. Check it out here.

If you build something with this endpoint and would like to collaborate with us, please get in touch with us via the community forums. We look forward to future collaboration with more of the community.

If you’re interested in using the endpoint to hide replies, here’s what you need to do:

  1. Create a developer account (if you haven’t yet). Access to Labs requires an approved developer account, even if you have an active app created through the former apps.twitter.com website.
  2. As soon as your developer account is approved, head over to the Labs section of the developer portal and click Join Labs.
  3. Select Activate next to Hide Replies, then select an app to connect.
  4. Start using the new endpoint. You can get started quickly by using the code samples on the Quick start page or the Postman collection for Labs.

Your feedback shapes the future

Thanks to the feedback from early adopters, we’re already working on improvements to the endpoint, including:

  • Support to unhide replies via the endpoint
  • A higher rate limit to support high-volume production use cases
  • A way to retrieve a list of replies with an indication of which ones are currently hidden or not

Head to our feedback page to leave additional suggestions on the hide replies endpoint.

5 Likes