This weekend, X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, announced it’s “starting to launch” a controversial change to how blocking works on its platform. Company owner Elon Musk first revealed the change in September, which will allow people you’ve blocked to continue to see your posts, and, as noted by TechCrunch, your following and followers lists.
Musk claimed that stopping people from seeing your public posts “makes no sense,” but due to a post-Musk change that stops logged-out users from scrolling even a public profile, this could make it easier for blocked users to continue harassing someone.
In October, X’s engineering account argued that people who block others could say harmful things about the blocked person who wouldn’t know about it and that the change allows for “greater transparency.” The change will still disable blocked users from following, liking, replying, reposting, DMing, or interacting with posts from the blocking party.
But as Tracy Chou, who launched the anti-harassment tool Block Party, said in a post on X, “…the point is that friction matters!! making it easy for a creeper to creep is not a good thing!!”
Another issue is whether the updated block function aligns with the rules in app stores. Apple’s guidelines say that apps with user-generated content must have “The ability to block abusive users from the service.”
Google’s guidelines are more specific:
UGC features that enable 1:1 user interaction with specific users (for example, direct messaging, tagging, mentioning, etc.) must provide an in-app functionality for blocking users.
Apps that provide access to publicly accessible UGC, such as social networking apps and blogger apps, must implement in-app functionality to report users and content, and to block users.
We’re starting to launch the block function update https://t.co/qNYIudCrqb
— Engineering (@XEng) November 3, 2024
