Here's what forced Twitter's hand to bring back the 'block' button

If you ever doubted the impact of social networks, this is a quick lesson in the power of crowdsourced opinions. Over Thursday and Friday, Twitter changed the functionality of the block button on its service and changed it back after an outcry on the website itself forced its hand.

Twitter had changed the block feature on its service to essentially turn it into a glorified mute button. When you blocked someone on the service earlier, the person was not able to tweet to you, favourite or retweet your tweets and contact you in any way possible. With the change, the block button ended up merely muting your abusers.

Unblocking the block

While you wouldn’t be notified of any interaction from their part, they could mention you, retweet your tweets and basically go through your timeline to find more information to attack you with. The company’s rationale behind this change was that the abusers would not be instigated to take a worse step to attack the victim, once he realised he was blocked.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

That explanation, however, did not go down well with Twitter users who pointed out issues like abusers being able to retweet their victims’ tweets to a wider audience involving more trolls. Promptly, Twitter changed its mind, reverting to the older ‘block’ button.

Here are some tweets that caught the most attention on Twitter, probably playing a role in getting the site to reconsider its decision: