Social media has as a function of encouraging interaction can also invite inappropriate comments. Twitter is no exception. With Twitter, you can always block individuals who you feel go beyond what you consider an acceptable level of civility, but this still means others who follow your tweets would see the reply or replies that caused you to make the move to block. In reality, you may be more concerned with what others think than with your own reaction.

Twitter has a new approach. You can now hide a comment. This does not actually delete the comment, but readers would have to take the step of making the effort to "view hidden comments" if they wonder whether or not you have hidden responses.

The process works like this.

What you see here is the type of political comment I make that probably begs for an iffy reaction. So I had posted a link to a NYTimes article concerning Corey Lewandowski's testimony before a congressional committee in which he had refused to explain comments he had made that had appeared in the Mueller report. I had suggested that refusing to answer a question from this congressional committee was an unlawful and obstructionist act as Lewandoski had no official standing allowing him to suggest he could refused to respond to questions based on this being a privileged conversation with the President. Someone (I have blurred the individual's identify) did not address my argument, but made a blanket statement about the committee. What if I regard this is completely irrelevant and inappropriate.

As the author of the original post, I can access multiple options in reaction to this reply (see image). Among these options is "hide reply". As I explained above, anyone examining my tweet and reactions would then not see this comment unless they opened the options available with my original tweet and selected the show hidden comments option. I am guessing Twitter is walking a fine line here and has decided this combination of hide reply and see hidden replies is a reasonable approach.

I would not actually hide the reply I used in this example. Knowing about this option I might hide responses that were a personal attack.

 I have a mixed reaction to what Twitter is doing here. I think there are clearly inappropriate responses to social media posts that others should not have to read and this is one way of blocking these specific comments. Of course, the same feature could be used by the tweet author to hide appropriate counter arguments.

Perhaps are there are individuals with audiences (say in education) that have to worry about the responses made to their social media activity. In general, I think inappropriate responses are more a reflection on the poster than me or my argument and I am willing to allow others to see both my comments and responses that I assume should be an embarrassment to the poster. It is useful to know this capability exists and each of us have to make decisions about how it used. Toggle panel: MicroblogPoster