Reverting the changes to block 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.
Context & Ripple Effects
The revert lands in a busy stretch for Twitter: within three days the company had refreshed its apps around a renewed push on direct messages — photo sharing in DMs and a DM shortcut in the tab bar — while its advertising enhancements sent the stock up 8.4%, its biggest gain since the IPO. The block change was the first misstep of that run, and the company pulled it the same day it shipped, saying plainly that it does not want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe.
What makes this story travel is its breadth: TechCrunch, Reuters, BBC, the Telegraph and Computerworld all picked it up on or about December 12, 2013, turning a single-day product reversal into a referendum on how Twitter weighs safety against other product goals. The company's own framing — that user feedback made the change untenable — sets the terms for how such reversals get judged.
First-order effects
- Users who rely on blocking get the previous behavior back the same day it changed, restoring whatever visibility and deterrence the original block function carried.
- Twitter's product team absorbs a visible same-ship-same-revert, an admission that the safety implications of the change were misjudged before launch.
Second-order effects
- Any platform weighing a softening of hard-blocking into quieter muting now knows the move carries public-backlash risk, raising the internal cost of similar redesigns at rival networks.
- The episode hands harassment researchers and safety advocates a concrete case study showing that perceived protection, not just technical enforcement, is what users evaluate.
Third-order effects
- If fast-feedback reversals become routine, platform safety defaults shift from unilateral engineering decisions toward de facto negotiations with the user base, shortening the ship-to-revert cycle industry-wide.
- Trust mechanics like blocking stop being invisible plumbing and start functioning as brand assets, which pressures platforms to document and defend safety-feature changes publicly before shipping them.
The trend: Consumer platforms are entering a cycle where safety-critical feature changes are treated as reversible under public pressure, making user trust a formal constraint on product rollout rather than an afterthought.