Only hours after Twitter introduced changes to the functionality of its block feature, it was forced to reverse them amid widespread outrage from users who claimed the social networking was exposing victims of abuse to perpetrators.
According to Reuters, executives held a late-night meeting in Twitter's San Francisco office to discuss the reaction to the changes, before publishing a blog post in the early hours of Friday morning to announce that the block feature had reverted to its previous functionality.
"Earlier today, we made a change to the way the 'block' function of Twitter works. We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users -- we never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe. Any blocks you had previously instituted are still in effect," wrote Michael Sippey, vice president of product at the social network.
The changes to the block feature meant that accounts blocked by a user would still be able to follow the user and favourite and retweet their tweets. Now they have been reversed, blocked users will once again have no way to view a user's feed or interact with them when they are logged in. Logged-out users have always been to see the Twitter feeds of people who have blocked them, but being unable to follow their tweets in their feed and respond to them does offer victims of abuse some level of protection.
The reason Twitter implemented the changes in the first place was to prevent people being able to see when they had been blocked and then retaliating. Reversing the changes obviously means the problem of retaliation still exists, but Twitter has promised not to give up on finding a solution to prevent this kind of abuse.
"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," writes Sippey.
Twitter has been implementing a series of small tweaks and adjustments recently in order to fine-tune the platform, but hopefully it's learnt a valuable lesson here -- that suddenly changing the level of control users have over their online safety with little warning leaves them feeling powerless and vulnerable.
Time and again, Twitter users have exhibited self-policing behaviour, but the social network still needs to be careful about how it handles the responsibility it has to protect victims from targeted abuse with its basic privacy infrastructure. It clearly does take this seriously, but Twitter's huge and diverse community ultimately has different needs and requirements, as well as differing views about how functionality should be implemented. However, shifting the emphasis of a safety feature from tackling one type of abuse to another -- which is one way the changes could be interpreted -- affects the trust of all users. It's something that Facebook had to figure out the hard way: there's no one size fits all solution to privacy, but adjusting exposure levels of users without warning is never going to be well received.
Kudos to Twitter, though, for reacting so swiftly to users' complaints. The task of tackling retaliation is unenviably tricksy, but at least the social network is acknowledging the nuanced and multifaceted nature of the abuse that does take place on the platform. Perhaps it's a conundrum that could be put to the mysterious #birdsignals community that the company recently launched.
