News

Twitter Now Supports Correct Arabic Feminine Form

Twitter has announced that it will allow Arabic-speaking women to be addressed in the feminine form instead of the default masculine form.

Published

5 years ago

June 22, 2021

Joanna Melki

Twitter

Professional translators don’t have it easy because various languages don’t just use different words to express the same notions — they also sometimes work completely differently. In Arabic (as well as several other languages), grammatical structures change depending on the gender of the subject.

Now imagine you’re a translator, and your job is to translate the word “Tweet” into Arabic. Do you choose the masculine form or the feminine form? When Twitter first added support for the language, it went with the former option. Now, the social network has also added support for the latter.

“We’re adding this language support to Twitter.com and working to bring it to Twitter for iOS and Android as well. We’re committed to using inclusive language at Twitter, regardless if it’s written down, shown on our site and apps, or embedded in our code,” write Carla El Maalouli, Head of Business Marketing at Twitter MENA, and Fabien Ho Ching Ma, Twitter Software Engineer.

رحبوا بالعربية (مؤنث)، لغة العرض الجديدة على نسخة الويب من تويتر. #أتحدث_بالمؤنث pic.twitter.com/MQL7qkou2K

— Twitter MENA (@TwitterMENA) June 15, 2021

The steps to switch from the default masculine form to the feminine form are very simple:

How To Switch To Twitter’s Arabic Feminine Form

Log in to Twitter.com.
Go to Settings and privacy.
Navigate to Accessibility, display, and languages.
Select Languages and Display language.
Pick the Arabic (feminine) option from the Display language menu.

Twitter will then address you using the feminine form. If you still see the masculine form, log out and log in again.

Also Read: Twitter Verification Badge Is Now Available To The Public

Alongside the support for the feminine form, Twitter is also launching a campaign titled #FeminineArabic أتحدث_بالمؤنث# to encourage other tech companies to follow suit.

“We know there’s more work to be done for our service to reflect the variety of voices around the world, and we’ll continue to share what we learn and how we update Twitter based on your feedback,” states the official press release.

News

Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch

The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.

Published

3 days ago

June 11, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.

Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.