Twitter changed one of its policies on Thursday in a way that made so many of its users so upset that they pressured the company, successfully, to change it back in a matter of hours. The policy in question was Twitter’s “block” function, which it changed to allow users to view and contact people who had blocked them, and to make it so that those doing the blocking could do so without alerting the blockee.”Before it backtracked, Twitter had said Thursday that the change was meant to protect victims of harassment who wanted to filter out abusive messages but feared that the act of blocking a user would prompt retaliation,” Reuters reports. But users saw it as tantamount to unblocking everybody, and flooded Twitter with complaints.
So just a few hours after it instituted the policy change, Twitter un-instituted it.”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,” Twitter wrote in a blog post. Reuters characterized the move as a “humbling reversal,” but on the positive side, it showed Twitter was willing to listen to its users’ complaints. Contrast that with Facebook, which, while it played around with allowing users to vote on policy, ultimately does what it wants.
