Twitter's efforts to combat harassment and abuse have been quite noticeable over the past few months, but company reps haven't spoken specifically about the service's "blocking" functionality since a December update last year. That led independent developers to invent blocking systems of their own—typically designed to block larger numbers of accounts in one fell swoop. Twitter hasn't followed course by distributing its own master blocking lists, but representatives did announce on Wednesday that the service had begun helping users share their own.
A Twitter blog post explained that users can now export their own customized lists of blocked Twitter accounts, which are converted into a downloadable .csv file that can then be sent and shared to other users. "We recognize that some users—those who experience high volumes of unwanted interactions on Twitter—need more sophisticated tools," Twitter engineer Xiaoyun Zhang wrote.
The author of BlockTogether, a free tool that requires sign-in access to block accounts—both those of known antagonists and accounts younger than 14 days—posted a response to Twitter's announcement with hopes for more Twitter-side updates to come. Developer Jacob Hoffman-Andrews cited key issues with the current solution, particularly a lack of auto-updating lists—meaning in the tool's current state, users would have to manually log in on more than a weekly basis to add new accounts. But he was optimistic, pointing to new tools such as Randi Harper's ShieldsUp that had already begun to marry both Twitter's new internal feature and the efforts of anti-abuse block list generators.
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