Earlier today, Twitter introduced a new blocking policy, wherein even after blocking a person he/she will continue to be able to follow your profile and track your tweets. Twitter’s idea behind this new policy was to avoid any kind of retaliation from the blocked person. Though it seems like a noble idea, the company had to face severe backlash from Twitter users and finally it retracted the policy.
According to the new policies, after blocking a person, a user would not be able to see him/her on the follower’s list or get updates about any interactions with the user’s tweets. But the blocked person could still access the user’s timeline and read and interact with the user’s tweets as if nothing had changed.
To make things clearer, Twitter mentioned on its blog post, “If your account is public, blocking a user does not prevent that user from following you, interacting with your Tweets, or receiving your updates in their timeline. If your Tweets are protected, blocking the user will cause them to unfollow you.”
In comparison, the older policies stated that once a person was blocked, he/she wouldn’t be able to add the user to their lists, see their profile on their timeline or follow.
It is understandable why there was a backlash from the users, as in essence the new policies wanted victims of stalking or harassing to close their eyes to the danger, instead of doing anything about it.
Twitter, was quick enough to control the situation before it got out of hand. It retracted the policies and reinstated the original policies. The issued statement reads.
