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Twitter said on Wednesday it will test new features early this year that would allow users to control who can reply to their tweets, as it looks to limit abuse and harassment on the platform. Social media firms are under pressure to address harassment on their sites, which often occurs in unsolicited replies targeting women and minorities, and Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has promised since 2018 to increase the "health" of public conversation. (1/9)

“We thought, well, what if we could actually put more control into the author’s hands before the fact? Give them really a way to control the conversation space, as they’re actually composing a tweet? So there’s a new project that we’re working on,” said [Suzanne Xie, head of conversations for the platform]. “The reason we’re doing this is, if we think about what conversation means on Twitter. Right now, public conversation on Twitter is you tweet something everyone in the world will see and everyone can reply, or you can have a very private conversation in a DM. So there’s an entire spectrum of conversations that we don’t see on Twitter yet.” (Lunden and Perez, 1/8)

[Kayvon Beykpour, VP of product at the company] acknowledged the trade-offs, as well as those inherent in every product decision Twitter makes. But it’s at least worth trying, he says, to evolve Twitter as a platform. “The philosophical approach we took here is, when you start a conversation, as the author of a tweet you should have a little more control over the replies to that tweet,” Beykpour said. Misinformation can still be called out with a quote-tweet, which doesn’t reach the same audience but at least offers some corrective path. (Barrett, 1/8)

Social media companies are facing intense scrutiny over how they are dealing with harassment - which has led to firms and governments introducing measures to tackle the issue. (1/9)

A new San Francisco startup wants to make accessing mental-health care almost as simple as ordering a ride to the airport on your phone. Cerebral, which launched Wednesday, offers an online alternative for people who have been left without good treatment options for mental-health issues. The company is following the example of Silicon Valley-funded upstarts like Hims Inc., Roman Health Medical LLC and Nurx Inc. that have widened access to baldness treatments, contraceptives and erectile-dysfunction drugs through discreet online interaction with doctors. (Brown, 1/8)

The Food and Drug Administration announced this week it will hold a public meeting in late March to talk with digital health companies and other stakeholders about everything from privacy and data sharing to the standards of evidence needed to bring a new technology to the market. The meeting is the latest in a string of steps the agency has taken as it grapples with how to regulate digital health products and tools that use artificial intelligence to help doctors decide how to treat patients. (Thielking, 1/8)