Twitter update: Your DMs now have read receipts — here's how to turn them off

On Thursday, Twitter introduced a feature nobody wanted: read receipts. 

The social media company announced changes to its direct messaging feature with a short video calling the new element "dynamic." Now, like in iPhone Messages and Facebook Messenger, you can see who has read your messages, and people can see if you've read messages you've sent them even if you haven't responded. 

Remind me to never look at my DMs ever again... I don't want the creeps who send me weird stuff knowing that I've read their messages to me. 

The read receipt feature is enabled by default, but there's a simple way to turn it off. Here's how to do it on desktop:

Go to your Twitter profile and click your avatar in the top-right corner of the page. You'll get a dropdown menu. Click Settings.

Once you're in Settings, click Security and privacy.

After you're in Security and privacy, scroll all the way down to Direct Messages. There, you'll want to uncheck the box that says "Send/Receive Read Receipts" and click "Save changes." You'll be asked to retype your Twitter password in order to save your preferences. 

Twitter also provides similar instructions for disabling read receipts on iOS and Android. 

As you can imagine, Twitter users weren't thrilled with this new feature, especially since the company has come under such fire recently for its lack of anti-harassment tools.