Twitter testing feature that will let you hide replies to your tweets

If you ever get frustrated by inane and even toxic replies degrading the value of your tweets, or even hijacking the thread completely, Twitter might have a solution for you.

The social networking company on Thursday confirmed it's developing a "Hide Tweet" feature that lets users protect their conversations by hiding individual replies to tweets. The "Hide Tweet" option was discovered in code for the Twitter Android app by Jane Manchun Wong, who tweeted about her findings on Thursday.

"Twitter is testing replies moderation," Wong tweeted Thursday morning. "It lets you to hide replies under your tweets, while providing an option to show the hidden replies."

The feature could help improve the health and civility of conversations on Twitter, which has come under fire multiple times in recent years for not doing enough to combat harassment on the platform. A study last year even found that the site is a "toxic place" especially for female journalists and politicians.

Twitter representatives didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but Michelle Yasmeen Haq, a senior program manager at Twitter discussed the new feature this afternoon in a thread on her personal Twitter account.

"People who start interesting conversations on Twitter are really important to us, and we want to empower them to make the conversations they start as healthy as possible by giving them some control," Haq wrote in a tweet explaining the feature.

"We already see people trying keep their conversations healthy by using block, mute, and report, but these tools don't always address the issue," she said. "With this feature, the person who started a conversation could choose to hide replies to their tweets. The hidden replies would be viewable by others through a menu option."

The feature's transparency will also allow the community to recognize and call out people who use the feature to hide content they disagree with, she said.

Haq said Twitter plans to begin testing the feature in the coming months.