Twitter is launching its Circle feature — which lets you post a tweet to a select set of people — globally. The company started testing this Instagram “Close Friends”-like feature in limited beta in May, and now it’s making it available to all users.
Users can add up to 150 people to their Circle, and currently, they can build only one of them. There’s no limit to who you can include in a Circle, so you can go ahead and add Harry Styles, if you want — though celebs may ignore your tweets.
People included in a Circle will see a special green badge under tweets to indicate that the post is only available to that group and not the user’s public timeline.
“You choose who’s in your Twitter Circle, and only the individuals you’ve added can view, reply to and interact with the Tweets you share in the Circle. People in your Circle will see a green badge under Tweets sent to the group,” the company said in a blog post.
Users don’t even get a notification when someone adds or removes them from a Circle. Plus, Twitter doesn’t allow users to leave a Circle, so they have to block the person who created it to stop being a part of it.
While the social network didn’t officially admit this, Circle is one of the ways the company has come up with to stop people from locking down their profiles, while maintaining some degree of privacy around specific posts. Just like tweets from locked profiles, users can’t retweet the tweets posted in a Circle. After this rollout, users have an option to post a tweet to their public timeline, to their Circle, or to a community they are part of.
Last week, Twitter revamped its audio tab to include over two million podcasts with live Spaces. The redesign will introduce personalized “Stations” for different topics like sports, news, movies, and music that will offer both recorded podcasts and live audio sessions.
While Twitter’s rolling out different product features like it’s business as usual, its former employee-turned-whistleblower Pieter “Mudge” Zatko’s complaint to U.S officials has caused a shitstorm for the company. Mudge, who has now been subpoenaed by Musk’s lawyers, accused Twitter of “egregious deficiencies, negligence, willful ignorance, and threats to national security and democracy” and tuning its user metrics to hide the number of bots on the platform. Earlier today, the Tesla CEO’s lawyers sent an additional agreement termination notice to Twitter based on allegations mentioned in Zatko’s complaint.