As the site formerly known as Twitter continues to battle spam on its platform, the Elon Musk-led company is working on a feature that will allow users to disable links in replies to their posts.
Application Finder Nima Owji was the first to spot the feature Last week, Christopher Stanley, senior director of security engineering at X, confirmed its authenticity in a response, writing: “My team built this.”
My team built this.
— Christopher Stanley (@cstanley) July 19, 2024
This feature is not yet available to the majority of users. It is not yet known whether the service will only be available to Premium users, who pay a monthly subscription, or whether it will be offered to a wider audience (or even not at all, in the long run).
The move could reduce the amount of spam users see, especially as the social media site wages an ongoing war against bots, which flood X with links to sites often infected with malware or viruses.
While this is certainly a good thing, it could also prevent the free flow of information, with people basing their arguments on legitimate data sources. It also risks leading people to simply reinforce their own beliefs without having to question them.
In a chaotic election year where misinformation is spreading, this could be particularly problematic.
X has introduced a number of new features over the past year. The company reportedly plans to include a Venmo-like payment feature as well as communities focused on adult content. The site also recently made changes that prevent users from seeing who “liked” their posts and focused more on Musk’s Grok AI project, which is an option for premium users.
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