Social media can be rather hit and miss when it comes to offering certain features to its users. Twitter found this out the hard way, first offering up a brand new “block” feature and then pulled it back after a wave of protests from its users. Quite a few people on Twitter (News - Alert) believed that the new feature would make it that much easier for online abuse to be carried out.
Twitter has been trying to make itself a bigger player in the social media universe for quite a while now. The site has carved out a nice little niche for itself, but it wants to grow out of that particular niche. The revamping of its direct messaging service was just one of the many steps it has tried or is planning in order to do that.
Offering up the ‘block’ feature and then pulling it back was an important step in the evolution of the company for all the wrong reasons. Twitter has managed to stay in its users good graces almost since its inception. This issue was really the first time that the company has come under fire since it became a public company. When it launched the blocking feature, the point was to protect victims of harassment who were looking to filter out abusive messages. These same users wouldn’t just outright block the abusers because they feared retaliation.
The main problem with the approach, according to most users is that the new blocking feature just meant that they couldn’t see the abuse. Twitter users are looking for something with a little more teeth and the social media site doesn’t have an answer to those desires just yet. The other problem is that users believed that their abusers would be notified that they were being blocked. This could basically incite the abuser to up the abuse in other ways. For its part, the company has said that its approach to this problem is always evolving and that it hopes to come up with a solution soon.
Edited by Cassandra Tucker
View all articles