Twitter is working on a feature that will allow you to control who can name you, and the test version discovered by app researcher and engineer Jane Manchun Wong will allow you to completely block mentions. Twitter privacy designer Dominic Camozzi confirmed the feature is in the works in a now-deleted tweet and asked for community feedback.
Letting Twitter users restrict who can @ them would be a pretty fundamental shift in how the platform works, preventing you from reaching out to a stranger through the platform to say hello or point something at them. Of course, it can also prevent bullying or harassment campaigns and provide marginalized users with another tool to protect themselves.
The screenshot posted by Wong shows controls that let you make sure everyone can mention you (as Twitter currently works by default), limit mentions to just the people you follow, or disable them altogether.
This wouldn’t be the first time Twitter has let users limit the list of people who can interact with them on the platform. In 2020, it launched a feature that lets you limit who can reply to a tweet to just the people you follow or people you mentioned in the tweet, and the recent Twitter Circles feature lets you make it so that only a select group of people can see certain tweets.
Update October 13, 3:47 PM ET: Updated to indicate that Camozzi deleted the tweet to confirm the feature was in the works.