This is a very unwise decision. I Follow people on Twitter who I've witnessed being stalked and harassed. Blocking helped to end that. Now the rule change lets the stalkers, trolls, and harassers have the upper hand. What Block was always missing was Mute. Now it's all been changed to Mute without Block. This is just screwy.
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.
I don't understand how this gives harassers the upper hand. If you can't see their messages any more doesn't that remove the harassment? I've seen multiple people say this today but I don't understand it. I've also never been outright harassed on Twitter so I'm sure there's something I'm missing.
For one thing, since Twitter capitulated to them in this regard, it means that they should continue their bad behaviours, because it will cause Twitter to change their policies.
I think that's a rather 'meta' example. A better one would be that if someone can reply to your tweets or mention your username, they can make it appear that you're (rudely) refusing to engage them in legitimate conversation. Or they can retweet you, followed by a series of their own tweets ridiculing you. I'm sure there are more creative ideas than this.
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.
Exactly so. They're now allowing the harassment to continue but unseen. I don't think people here have a thorough understanding of the naked hatred some people espouse on Twitter towards individuals. I'm constantly shocked at the abuse women I Follow get that they then RT to display it for others to see. Why don't some of you who don't think this is a big deal set up an account as a woman and start doing some pro-women tweeting? Your eyes might be opened very quickly. I'm a guy and I've had people -- OK, mainly other guys -- display sick stalking and Blocking was the way to put a stop to that. They didn't have the time or energy to manually copy/paste my tweets to keep it going. Now they don't even have that friction to deal with. They can harass people behind their back. Protecting an account has a penalty -- your tweets can't be RTed by Followers. This is the punishment of the innocent and the liberation of the guilty.
think of it as a set of effort versus determination curves. every time you shift the effort curve a bunch of less-determined jerks give up. on the other hand if you shift the curve the other way and jerkery becomes as easy as pressing a button, a lot more people will give in to the casual impulse to do son.
If someone is stalking or harassing, they can just set up another account - blocking has no affect but to antagonize.
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.
Harassers can set up another account, but they generally don't. And not seeing the harasser's messages is not the only goal - when you force the harasser to unfollow, they don't see and harass your retweets either.
The goal isn't not to be seen - people already know about protected accounts. The goal is not to be harassed.
That's one answer, but it's not a very good one. Can we think of no better option than for people who are being harassed to 'decide whether they should be posting publicly'?
Ah, but to hell with rationality! You think it's rational for someone to reply to all of your tweets with mindless abuse, and to encourage other people to do the same?
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.
That's a reasonable distinction you make. At least with the new system, the victim will not see and hopefully never know about the troll responses, perhaps discouraging the troll...
What you are missing here is that the trolls friends still show up in the original persons mentions. So rather than the troll disappearing and interacting stopping it allows the abuse to spread.
The new system put the onus on the person being abused to keep blocking, whereas the old one general just stopped it.
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.
Unfortunately, getting off the internet publicly is the only choice for someone who is being harassed to that degree. That's just reality - there is nothing Twitter nor anyone else can do about it short of gestapo censorship.
I don't understand the flap about this. Your public tweets will always be accessible by someone. There is no way to prevent them seeing things in retweets, or via an alt, or embedded, or whatever.
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.
I think the point is that some people had come to expect that blocking works a certain way, and they're not happy that it has changed. In particular, it seems that people were using blocking as a way of having a pseudo-private status - public to everyone except these people. Now, their tweets are public to everyone, and the people they're blocking are just hidden from their view. This seems odd to me because it never occurred to me that this pseudo-privacy was possible - I always assumed that anything tweeted from a public account is visible to the whole world. And, of course, it always was - blocking someone just made it more difficult for that person to see your tweets, not impossible.
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.
It still was visible to those people; they just had to view the persons feed while not logged in or under a different account. If people were relying on this feature to control access to their tweets, they were not doing it right.
Actually you didn't have to log out or switch accounts. If a user blocked me, I could simply navigate to their page manually and view their tweets. It only prevented me from following them.
I see your point, but you're bringing your own assumptions about public and private here, and Twitter doesn't have to obey those assumptions (for clarity: I share your assumptions about public and private).
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Good. I subscribe to the idea that blocking is the right reaction to people who draw you into pointless arguments or who are a net drag on your experience. I block a lot of people. But Twitter's old behavior was needlessly punitive; it was just stupid to pretend that they could bidirectionally sever my connection with someone else on the network, and so instead they were just annoying people for no reason.
Net result: I can block more people now, and not feel guilty about it.
Hellbanning only works when _noone_ can read your posts. If you can be read by everyone but your "mark" then it's only one step removed from the harrassee.
Indeed. And better yet (from the POV of stalkers) the change will allow them to easily join in conversations between their targets and other people in the conversation.
I suppose people from Twitter will read this. You guys have a bigger problem to deal with than this disastrous change to Block. I Protected my account in protest tonight. And did it just in the nick of time -- over 1800 Follower requests poured in. My account was bombed again by fake Followers. This is the third time it's happened. It took over a month for Twitter to delete over 10,000 fake Followers I was bombed with the first time. And they still haven't deleted the latest ~2,000 from a few weeks ago. And now tonight it happened again. Twitter needs to get its priorities straight -- and changing Block is not that priority. Stopping the fake Follower bombing should be. [typo edit]
Someone who was bombing my account saw my announcement that I was going to Protect my account and tried to bomb it before I did. I was faster and the fake Followers wound up in a request queue. Now that Twitter has restored Block, my account is again UnProtected and those 1,800+ are now automatically added to my Follower count. [typo edit]
It creates havoc with all the services that create metrics about Twitter. It's also bad for Twitter in terms of selling advertising based on user numbers. If advertisers, say, want to target people with N Followers, how can they be sure those numbers are actual people and not fake bot accounts?
It also disallows the blockee following the blocker and blocks the blocker from seeing the blockees tweets.
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.
I just don't see the value in blocking people beyond muting them anyway. They can just create a new account and view whatever they want anyway. This way, they don't know if they are blocked or if they are just ignoring them, which is probably better.
I'd be interested to know more about the rationale behind this.
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.
I know a lot of people - myself included - who have two personal Twitter accounts. One is public, the other one is protected.
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.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned how this relates to spam fighting. One could speculate that by switching to this "shadowban" system, spammers have less data to figure out whether their accounts are being banned/blocked or not. This is pretty common amongst other large web properties -- Reddit and Yelp are two that come to mind. Even if the banning is on a per-user basis, one could imagine that twitter uses ban counts as a metric for spam detection and so if a spammer cannot measure this metric themselves, they won't know when to taper/accelerate their spamming to game the detection algorithms.
That's how it originally worked, but with the proposed changes, turning blocking into effectively muting, a spammer can still see tweets from the spammed account, but the spammed account will no longer see tweets from the spammer.
Note: twitter has backtracked on this change anyway, so it's back to how it originally worked.
The day twitter puts granular privacy options for each tweet is the day I will begin using it 10x more. Facebook has this nailed and I make religious use of this feature.
Having your side conversation with your family show up in your prospective customer's feed isn't acceptable.
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.