Skip to main content

Twitter Circle launches globally, but lots of us can’t add anyone yet

The bird app’s coveted Circle feature finally launched globally this week, but many users still can’t use it.

On Tuesday, Twitter announced via a tweet that Twitter Circle (a feature that lets you tweet to just a chosen few), was finally available for all users on Android, iOS, and the web. But then, many of us quickly opened up our apps and checked online to try it out only to be met with a shiny new feature that apparently isn’t working properly right now.

Recommended Videos

https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1564606440051838981

Lots of users took to Twitter to tweet their frustration that while they could see the Twitter Circle feature, they still couldn’t actually add any of their friends to their Circles because the Add button doesn’t seem to respond when you press it. And being able to add a few of your trusted followers so you can tweet only to them is kind of the whole point.

A few of us at Digital Trends tried to use Twitter Circle and also had trouble getting it to work. One of us noticed that the Add button doesn’t seem to work for them on the mobile app for Android and that the Circle feature didn’t appear in the Tweet composer on the desktop web version of Twitter. And one of our editors said that currently, they weren’t able to edit people or send tweets to their Circle.

Ideally, if you’re accessing Twitter Circle via the desktop site, you should be able to do so via the Tweet composer in the Choose Audience drop-down menu or via the menu that’s accessible in the left-hand sidebar’s More option. But for me, neither of those methods worked. The Choose Audience drop-down menu didn’t offer a Twitter Circle option and when I selected the Twitter Circle option within the More menu, Twitter Circle wouldn’t load.

Also, according to a GIF image shared by Twitter to Digital Trends, after selecting the Add button on the mobile app, the button should change from “Add” to “Remove,” indicating that the person you added has actually been added. When I selected the Add button on the Android app, nothing happened. The Add button didn’t respond in any way nor did it change itself to show “Remove.”

Twitter Circle
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Digital Trends did reach out to Twitter for comment on the Twitter Circle feature issues and we received confirmation that Twitter is aware of the issue and that it is “looking into it and working on a fix.”

Anita George
Anita George has been writing for Digital Trends' Computing section since 2018. So for almost six years, Anita has written…
Some blue check Twitter users were unable to edit their names
Twitter app on the OnePlus 10T.

Twitter's recent blue check verification drama took an even sillier turn yesterday. Amid all the recent commotion regarding Twitter Blue subscriptions, paying for blue checks, and impersonation versus parody, some Twitter users temporarily lost their ability to edit their screen names.

On Monday evening, some verified Twitter users began reporting that they couldn't change their screen names. It's unclear to us at this time if the issue these users were experiencing was a bug or a new feature of a platform that was recently purchased by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Read more
Mastodon surpasses 1 million monthly active users as Twitter backlash worsens
Series of four mobile screenshots showing Mastodon's sign-up process.

Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter that's been getting a lot of attention lately, just surpassed 1 million monthly active users this week, all while Twitter struggles to deal with the  backlash caused by recently announced changes to its platform.

On Monday, Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon, announced via a Mastodon post that the social media platform now has "1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today." This news comes after a particularly tumultuous week (and weekend) for Twitter after Elon Musk took over the popular microblogging platform just last month.

Read more
Twitter is reportedly working on paid DMs to celebrities
The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

In what appears to be another effort to help Twitter generate revenue at the start of its Elon Musk era, the social media platform is reportedly working on paid Direct Messaging (DM), with a particular emphasis on those paid messages being sent to celebrities.

On Thursday, The New York Times published a report in which it mentioned that -- according to internal documents it saw and "two people with knowledge of the work" -- that Twitter was working on a paid DM feature that would allow users to send messages to celebrities for a fee. The fee structure for this feature apparently hasn't been officially finalized yet, but The Times did note that it could be "as little as a few dollars per direct message."

Read more