Blocking people on Twitter now just mutes them
forbes.com
forbes.com
And saying to Protect your account is like a punishment to the innocent. Unless Twitter has changed their TOS, it's a TOS violation to RT a Protected account.
One might argue that any harm done here is outweighed by the fact that the target of the harassment won't be able to see any of it, and I find that argument reasonably persuasive. It seems that Twitter's decision has been taken in order to make blocking a 'silent' or 'invisible' action, such that the person being blocked cannot know that they're blocked. Their calculation seems to be that harm is reduced this way, because it introduces an asymmetry of information in favour of the person doing the blocking - they know who they have blocked, but the person they've blocked does not. To call that 'capitulation' is not an accurate reading of the situation, in my view.
(edit: I want to stress that I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it seems rather counter-intuitive.)
Personally, I liked the change; I'd like to be able to block annoying people who nevertheless RT my stuff.
If someone is being stalked or harassed, they need to decide whether they should be posting publicly on twitter, because no amount of blocking will prevent a stalker from seeing what they post.
The only thing the victim can do with regard to twitter is:
- Stop posting publicly (post privately or don't post)
- Stop themselves from seeing the harassing messages, which this new block functionality does.
The change makes complete sense, as it doesn't deceive users into thinking blocking makes something private.
For better or worse (I think it's for worse, which is why I don't tweet all that much), Twitter encourages rapid-fire think-before-speaking responses to things. You see something you don't like, you hit reply and boom, you've just told that person to die in a fire. Or you've just retweeted it to your small but equally annoying group of friends. The purpose of the old blocking system, in a way, was to prevent trolls[1] from seeing things that might provoke them into action.
The goal is not actually to prevent someone from seeing your messages, but to prevent someone who is logged in to an active twitter account with a >0 number of followers from seeing your tweet. That's a non-trivial difference. I started out (in my other comments) thinking that the difference really was trivial, but you actually have to think like a troll in order to understand why it isn't. Unless they really cared about harassing someone, the old-style block would probably be enough to stop most people from tweeting an insult, if only because it forces them to 'cool off' by logging out, finding the person they want to harass, and logging back in again in order to reply.
I can't shake the feeling that neither policy is really right, and there must be a more elegant solution. But, it's 1am here and I should probably get some sleep before trying to find the solution that has evaded the entire internet for 20 years.
[1] I don't use the term 'trolls' lightly. Lots of things get called 'trolling' which really aren't, but in this case I think it's valid.
The new system put the onus on the person being abused to keep blocking, whereas the old one general just stopped it.
The goal isn't not to be seen - people already know about protected accounts. The goal is not to be harassed.
In other words, get off the Internet. Do you recall a fracas from several years ago when several well-known (on the Net) people harassed Scoble's wife, Kathy Sierra, and some others? Kathy was basically driven off the Net. She's only recently come back to Twitter and now this happens.
If you are concerned who sees your tweets, you should be considering a private profile. If you want to avoid interacting with someone or seeing anything of theirs, you can block them. This seems very functional to me, and in line with the definition of "public" online communication.
But perhaps that difficulty was enough, and this was important to people who used the feature. Logically, blocking people from reading your tweets seems almost silly, because you can't really control who sees your tweets from a public account, but the illusion of control probably did a lot for the peace of mind of people who were being harassed.
From another perspective, Twitter is an institution that makes rules to govern the conduct of its users. Those rules are made public, and users can construct their own order on top of those rules. This is pretty much the principle behind rule of law - we get to know what's allowed and what isn't, and we can then construct our own arrangements on top of this foundation. Some people came up with some creative ways of using Twitter's rules to control access to their tweets, which is exactly the kind of behaviour one should expect. Then Twitter changed the rules, invalidating the order that these users had constructed. They're upset, and that's not unreasonable.
Sure, there's a principled argument to say that "public stuff should always be public". Twitter's new policy makes tweets much more like blog posts - you can decide which blogs and comments you want to read, but you can't decide who reads your blog. I have no real problem with that as a policy. But it's still the case that Twitter, seemingly without warning, changed a policy in a way that broke social conventions that their existing userbase had developed. That's legitimately annoying for those people.
Why do people put passwords on their computers? Anybody who has physical access can just remove the hard drive.
Why do people lock their cars? Anybody who wants to steal something can just smash the window.
There's no other comparable situation in which you'd make a public announcement and somehow expect some group of people who could hear it to not hear it. And let's be clear - every 'tweet' is a public announcement to the world at large.
Would you make an announcement on the 6:00 news and expect only some of the audience to see it?
Would you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and think you could exercise control over who reads it?
To invert it a bit, would you flag an email as spam and expect you could not mail the sender ever again?
The problem is, it used to work one way and now Twitter is (or, was) changing it with some really flimsy justification (now they can't tell when you blocked them! except there are other ways that worked). It'd be one thing if blocking worked this way from day one, it's another entirely to suddenly change it.
Net result: I can block more people now, and not feel guilty about it.
See Hellbanning - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
Too, this problem you've described isn't one that seems common - at least a google search only turns up your comments about it.
Given this, it seems the priorities are about right...
I think the reasoning is that if someone @'s your username, you can see it. If you block them, you can’t see their tweets and thus can’t see their @'s and won’t be bothered by them. If your tweets are not private and if blocking prevented a user from seeing your tweets, they could simply log out and see your tweets; therefore any coded functionality that would block them from seeing your tweets is useless.
It's been like this for at least six months. It used to be you could tell that you had been blocked by getting an error when you try to expand a tweet, but now you can’t even tell that you have been blocked unless you try to follow the blocker.
As I see it, the change means:
1) The blocked person doesn't know that they're blocked, so they cannot be certain as to whether their tweets are being seen
2) The blocked person can now mention the username of the person who has blocked them (obviously this is required by #1 - if they couldn't mention them, then the existence of the block would be obvious)
3) The person who places the block cannot see any tweets by the blocked person, except in search results or by visiting that person's profile page
So, it seems like a trade-off between the old situation in which blocking someone would prevent them from mentioning your username, but would also inform them of the block, and the new situation where the blocked person is not informed. There's really no way of secretly blocking someone unless you allow that person to continue tweeting at you, because if that were prevented then the block would be revealed.
I may lack the necessary perspective on this, but to me this looks like a not-unreasonable trade-off to make. If you inform someone that they're blocked, they will know that they need to sign up another account in order to follow you. Informing someone of the existence of a block may also be a trigger for escalating harassment. On the flip side, if someone can mention your username then they can make it appear as if they're engaging you in conversation and you're actively choosing not to reciprocate, where in fact you have blocked them.
It's a difficult balance to get right. An alternative long-term solution might be to have different privacy levels per-tweet, or to allow a person to have multiple personas, with one being private and another public, so that you can have some tweets which are for everyone and some which are for family and friends only, which would prevent a third-party harasser from hijacking personal conversations. But any move in that direction dilutes the simplicity and directness which is what differentiates Twitter from, say, email or IRC, and also raises the stakes in situations where people mistakenly tweet something to the wrong persona or privacy level.
EDIT: When I said that I may lack the necessary perspective, I was correct. It seems that the main benefit of the old block system was that, if you have a follower who actively dislikes you, you could prevent them from seeing your tweets in real-time in their main account, which is often enough to stop them responding, or retweeting you in order to encourage others to respond. It's not entirely rational, but then abusing people on Twitter isn't rational either, so perhaps this is one of those situations where behaviour of the wetware nodes on the network needs greater consideration.
Most of these people use third-party clients rather than the website; Twitter doesn't make it terribly easy to switch accounts, which makes for a good value proposition to drop a few bucks onto a client.
Having your side conversation with your family show up in your prospective customer's feed isn't acceptable.
Note: twitter has backtracked on this change anyway, so it's back to how it originally worked.