Twitter is promoting third-party apps to help with safety

Rather than doing the hard work of building their own safety tools, Twitter appears to now be pushing users towards third-party apps to keep themselves safe on the platform. 

As spotted by TechCrunch, Twitter is now running a limited test that promotes third-party apps as an alternative for when the company’s own tools and features don’t offer enough utility to users. For now, this test is limited to just the safety tools Block Party, Bodyguard and Moderate.

In the test, the prompt to consider using one of these third-party tools appears when muting or blocking another account on Twitter, so as to not be intrusive to the overall experience. It is currently unclear if other tools in Twitters Toolbox, such as the “expression” and “measurement” tools will be similarly advertised to users. 

Despite the new initiative directly advertising it to users, Twitter’s Toolbox has actually been around for a number of months as an online hub that showcases the third-party tools developers have created to improve the platform. This online hub was introduced to incentivise developers to create and collaborate using Twitter’s rebuilt API, something many developers have shied away from after years of hostility from Twitter. 

Speaking to TechCrunch, Amir Shevat, Twitter’s head of dev product, stated that “[developers] want users and we want to provide them with the right users at the right time — giving value both to Twitter users, who are at the moment needing those developer innovations, and giving distribution to those developers.”

“This is the first step in us working with developers to actually enable those needs,” Shevat continued.