Twitter allows users to pay content creators with bitcoin

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Twitter will now allow users to tip their favourite content creators with bitcoin. The San Francisco-based company will also launch a fund to pay some users who host audio chat rooms on its Spaces feature. The announcements are part of Twitter’s bids to woo popular content creators with a large following even as it competes with Facebook and YouTube.

Twitter is also keen on changing its image as a platform where polarised discussions mushroom. The micro-blogging site will also test methods aimed at a safer experience for users. It may include a warning when people are entering a “heated” conversation or letting them leave tweet threads.

Twitter users on iOS devices can now send and receive digital payments, a facility previously available to a limited group of testers, media report said.

“We believe we can continue to incentivise the types of conversations that people want to see,” Esther Crawford, product lead for creator monetisation at Twitter, was quoted as saying in media reports. Twitter also said it plans to support NFT (non-fungible tokens) authentication. The feature will allow users to showcase their NFT ownership on Twitter.

NFTs are digital assets such as images or videos that exist on a blockchain.

Twitter also plans to launch a creator fund that will provide financial, technical and marketing support to users who host recurring audio programming on Spaces.

Spaces are audio, giving users the freedom and flexibility to start a conversation at any time, from anywhere. It brings the power of voice straight to the audience.

Twitter efforts to Such support will allow more Spaces hosts to organize better conversations and potentially gain brand sponsorship deals, said Andre Jean-Pierre, who served as an early beta-tester for Spaces.

Twitter added it is exploring how to allow users to filter out certain words they do not want to see in the replies to their tweets, which could be used to stop name-calling or abusive speech.