Twitter Circle Is Finally Here So You Can Keep Your Mundane Little Tweets Private

It's like Instagram's Close Friends feature, but less juicy.

Twitter Circle, a feature that lets you choose a smaller audience of accounts that can view your tweets, launched globally today in what will hopefully be a return to boring, niche posts.

I was randomly selected to receive Twitter Circle early, so I can advise you on how to best use the feature. I use it like the Close Friends feature on Instagram, but for me it’s less of a juicy diary than a captain’s log of nonsense venting.

Here’s how Twitter Circle works.

You start by building your Circle. I added my real-life friends and a smattering of internet strangers Twitter suggested I might want to add, which I suspect means I’ve probably been overly intimate with them on main, and they know what they’re getting into. You can shove up to 150 accounts in there.

When you are composing a tweet, click on the drop-down menu that says “everyone.”

There, beneath “choose audience,” you can edit your Circle.

Twitter will recommend accounts for you to add, so prepare to feel perceived. Remove anyone at any time.

To post to your Twitter Circle, select that option from the same drop-down menu as before. Anything you post to your Circle will have a pop-up box at the bottom noting that is the case — conveniently the same color as Close Friends on Instagram.

Content shared to your Circle is still subject to community guidelines and it can still be screenshotted. Twitter bills the feature as a victory for privacy, but I see it as an opportunity to personally experiment with more mundane posts.

In a world in which social media sites are copying BeReal’s mission to bring you authenticity through the most mundane content possible, Circle is a great place to publish your drafts and try jokes out on a smaller audience before hitting the big time. Who cares how many likes something gets if it’s just a little secret for the besties?

In the early days of Twitter, I struggled to understand what the site could even be used for. Statuses were the most boring part of Facebook, and Twitter was only that. But there’s something fun about being able to send your thoughts to a group of friends wider than your group chat and smaller than a public account.

Why not broadcast your boring life updates (eating a croissant) or your mental health struggles (sad for no reason again) to a group of trusted confidantes who will encounter them while scrolling the timeline for discourse?

Seems to me like a pseudo-copycat feature that’s actually making the internet a more private and comfortable place to be. But the most important thing to note about Twitter Circle is that you should add me to yours because I enjoy reading them.


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