WATCH: Nicole Bogart explains what new Twitter feature is causing a stir.
TORONTO – Twitter is taking your timeline into its own hands.
The social media company revealed Friday it’s testing a new timeline feature that will show users tweets from people they don’t follow.
“Choosing who to follow is a great first step – in many cases, the best Tweets come from people you already know, or know of. But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy,” read a blog post from Twitter’s Trevor O’Brien published Friday.
“To help you keep up with what’s happening, we’ve been testing ways to include these Tweets in your timeline — ones we think you’ll find interesting or entertaining.”
But some Twitter users are not reacting well to the changes, arguing that it goes against the idea of curating your own feed with the voices you want to hear from.
READ MORE: Twitter testing ‘buy’ button on tweets
“If I find it interesting I will follow them. If I don’t follow I don’t want to see,” tweeted one user in response to the announcement.
“Please, don’t turn Twitter into Facebook.”
“Please don’t do this,” read another. “One of the great things about Twitter is my ability to control the content. Forcing tweets is basically spam.”
Global News has contacted Twitter regarding users’ concerns about the timeline experiments; but a request for comment was not immediately returned.
Twitter described the move as an “experiment” in its blog post, noting that experiments don’t always make it to its entire user base.
However, describing the change as an “experiment” may not be a wise choice for the social network, whose competitors have recently come under fire for experimenting on users.
Facebook faced intense criticism in June after it was revealed the social network conducted a psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 users without their knowledge. The study, done in collaboration with two U.S. universities, involved manipulating users’ newsfeeds to evaluate how negative and positive posts affected their emotions.
READ MORE: Facebook’s emotion manipulation study sparks criticism
In July, online dating site OKCupid revealed it too conducts experiments on its users, in some cases manipulating people’s “matches” to say they weren’t a good fit, even if the site’s algorithm said the two users were a perfect match.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has changed the way user’s timelines work.
In August, users began complaining that tweets from people they didn’t follow were appearing in their timelines because they had been “favourited” by people they did follow – similar to a retweet.
The “Favourite” button on Twitter was traditionally used by users to bookmark a tweet for later and was only visible to the user on their own profile.
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