14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter made a change to its blocking policy only to go back on it hours later as users were up in arms over the issue.
The company modified the blocking policy, turning the feature into a simple mute setting. Originally, blocking someone used to mean that they could no longer see your tweets. The company changed this so that only you would stop seeing that person’s feed, while your own would still be out in the open, if it was set to public.
“If your account is public, blocking a user does not prevent that user from following you, interacting with your Tweets, or receiving your updates in their timeline,” Twitter’s new policy read.
Twitter had a fairly good reasoning behind the decision. The company told CNET that the new policy was meant to help people from being trolled by those they’d blocked. Most often, when people got blocked, they’d become upset when discovering it and would go on to troll the blocker in aggressive ways. With the new system that the company briefly had set in place, the blockee had no idea of their brand new status.
Twitter’s heart seems to have been in a good place, but users felt it basically nullified the most important aspect of the blocking feature.
As expected, users were not happy about the changes and they made sure Twitter knew their displeasure. One of the main arguments was that it made them feel less secure since that person could still stalk them.
There is some reason in Twitter’s view however. If a profile was set to public, then there was no way to actually stop a person from seeing it.
For instance, if you want to block, let’s say, an old colleague, then he or she would no longer see your profile while logged into Twitter. If your account is set to “public,” then that person could simply log out, go to your profile and still view the public messages.
Nonetheless, Twitter went back on the changes. In an official blog post, Michael Sippey, VP of product, said that the changes had been reverted. “We never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe,” he wrote.
“In reverting this change to the block function, users will once again be able to tell that they’ve been blocked. We believe this is not ideal, largely due to the retaliation against blocking users by blocked users (and sometimes their friends) that often occurs. Some users worry just as much about post-blocking retaliation as they do about pre-blocking abuse. Moving forward, we will continue to explore features designed to protect users from abuse and prevent retaliation,” Sippey wrote.