Twitter introduced new premium features and safety measures on its platform, as it looks to return to profitability by offering a novel subscription model providing compelling content.

Its Super Follows feature will let users generate revenue by offering exclusive content to their followers for a monthly subscription priced at $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99.

The feature is aimed at anyone who expresses their views and “drive the public conversation” on Twitter, including activists, journalists, writers, musicians and comedians.

Paying followers will gain access to their “unfiltered thoughts, early previews and subscriber-only conversations”.

Initially, the functionality is open to a select group of iOS users in the US and Canada, though Twitter plans to expand it to all users of the Apple platform in the next few weeks with Android compatibility to follow.

Twitter also started rolling out a Safety Mode to a small group, providing an option to block accounts for seven days over using harmful speech or sending intrusive replies.

The security feature will also automatically detect and block authors of tweets which are found to be “harmful or uninvited”, though the company was laconic on explaining how its systems recognise which content falls into this category.

After falling into red with a net loss of $1.14 billion in 2020, Twitter has been mulling ways to expand its revenue streams.

Its first attempt was made in June, when it enabled users to reverse the publishing of a tweet and organise saved content.