This will be a welcome update for many IG and Facebook users.

Today, Meta announced that you'll be able to turn off read receipts for your DMs shortly so you now have control over when "Read" and "Seen" indicators appear-or don't-for the sender in message streams.
Soon, on Instagram too, you will have the option to turn off read receipts, and this same setting will be rolled out to Meta's other messaging tools. So if you're interested in not letting people know that you have read their DM, remove the "Seen" notification, and they will be left hanging.

Look, for me personally, I do not care about this since most of them know that you are not going to answer them right away. For others, it does become an issue because they might be distracted and do something else, then forget to reply, and at which point the recipient reminds them that they have seen it.

That can make people feel unloved, unimportant, or just annoyed by your seeming lack of emphasis on their note. So now, you can just switch it off, and pretend like you never saw it till you reply, saving the world from a little more heartache

It's been a much-requested addition, and many will welcome the news. 

And maybe, just perhaps, it will be useful to the brands, too. After all, you want to answer queries by customers as soon as possible, always, but perhaps, if you turn off receipts, that will also be helpful in managing expectations.

Meta says that the new toggle is an initial, limited test with a view to rolling it out in a broader way in the near future.