Given that CEO Dick Costolo himself has admitted that Twitter has a problem with online harassment, people are pretty upset thinking that anybody with an axe to grind will be able to send them private messages.
However, this isn’t true unless users want it to be. Users will have to turn the feature on themselves.
Back in 2013, Twitter tested this very same feature, but removed it quickly. That time, once users opted in to get messages from anybody, they lost the option to turn it off, and they can still receive messages to this day.
This time around, that won’t be the case. You can opt out of the feature any time.
From Twitter’s perspective, this option is potentially good for advertisers and brands, since it makes it a little easier for customer support representatives to talk to users and customers.
Twitter likely sees this optional setting as a first step towards maturing Twitter direct messages as a competitor to more fully-featured apps Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
Article Appeared @http://www.digitaljournal.com/internet/this-new-twitter-feature-has-a-lot-of-people-upset/article/431277
This article was originally published on Business Insider. Copyright 2015.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-will-let-you-dm-anybody-2015-4#ixzz3YW8S3bVG