It can be pretty embarrassing — or even traumatizing — to follow an image or video link in a tweet only to discover that it leads to obscene content. Thankfully Twitter is intending to prevent such awkward incidents by warning users about "possibly sensitive" items.
Twitter has just shared the news about this feature with developers and provided them with instructions about how they can incorporate it in their tools. For now, things are just in an "initial testing phase," but both users and developers will eventually be able to fully take advantage of the feature.
Basically, you'll able to flag "possibly sensitive content" on your own and other users' tweets in order to trigger a warning for anyone else who might try to view the linked image or video. In theory, this should help keep everyone's eyes unviolated. (You can already flag content, but that there is no warning message which is triggered at this point.)
While this change doesn't sound like it will be earth-shattering, it certainly has the potential to prevent us from opening up inappropriate images while our bosses are hovering behind us or when young eyes are watching. Unfortunately there is no word on when the warning messages will first begin showing up, so we'll have to keep being careful for now.
Related stories:
- 'Anti-social network' video spoof mocks Google+
- Program can identify your gender based on a single tweet
- White House rickrolls bored Twitter follower
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook. Oh, and she can be found on Google+, too.
