Update (28.March.2013): So, it looks like a bug… and – thankfully – not a policy!

Original post:

Around noon today, I noticed a few tweets that had my Twitter handle as a @mention did not appear in my mobile (Twitter’s default android app), but I recalled seeing them on my desktop (Twitter web and Tweetdeck web). This is odd!

Did a search now and noticed a LOT of people talking about some new Twitter rule. The rule, according to a lot of people’s assumption goes like this – if someone does not follow you, he/she cannot see your @mentions (of their handle)! Here are some search results.

 

Right now, it looks like this is affecting mobile versions only. There’s no update from Twitter on this yet, except a tweet around 6:47pm today that says, in a broad way,

And then there are many who say that there is a new setting that you have to enable – “Change your settings to view ANYONE who mentions you”, it seems!

Since there is no update from Twitter, let me not extrapolate too deeply. But one thing’s for sure – for celebrities who are phenomenally annoyed by trolls who keep @mention’ing them pointlessly, this is going to be a boon.

But, at the same time, they’d not be able to get out of their circle of friends – almost like a, ‘if I cannot see you, I can’t hear you’ on Twitter. That completely beats the purpose of Twitter, as an open platform, even if this is a opt-in setting.

If they opt-in for this, they would not hear rah-rahs about them as much as they can’t hear people abusing them and criticizing them (thankfully, automated sentiment analysis online is a mess!), unless they do a manual search using Twitter’s native search function (which has been getting a lot of updates lately, incidentally) with a ‘@theirhandle’. But I’m sure a lot of completely vain celebrities will love this option, if Twitter has really cooked this new setting.

I personally see this as massively pointless and would immediately opt out of this. I can only hope this is an option and not baked by default into Twitter. At present, I cannot see any new option in my settings. But yes, Twitter’s default mobile app (at least on Android) already has a notification setting that allows you to see @mentions from (a) only people who you follow or (b) from anyone. This level of notification choice is not available for the web version, however. To be clear, I have ‘from anyone’ as the setting in my mobile – and I still see some mentions only on web, and not on mobile.

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