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.