Twitter reverts controversial changes to block functionality Twitter: Reverted its change to the blocking policy. Twitter caused such an uproar with a controversial change to its blocking policy on Friday that the social network ultimately backflipped and reversed the change within hours. Originally, when you blocked a user it meant that person could not follow you and could not track your updates on the service. A change to that policy on Friday meant that if you block someone, that person could still see everything you do, interact with you and receive your updates on his or her timeline. You just wouldn't see that person's activity on Twitter - essentially changing the block function into a mute function. That meant blocked users could retweet or favourite your tweets. Twitter said it was trying to shield people from retaliation. Before, when someone found out a Twitter user had blocked him or her, that person would at times act out aggressively. With the update, people you blocked would have had no idea you blocked them. But after a tirade of tweets from unhappy users, the company reverted to the original blocking functionality. "We never want to introduce features at the cost of users feeling less safe," wrote Twitter's vice-president of product Michael Sippy in a blog post. Any blocks you had previously instituted are still in effect. He added: "We will continue to explore features designed to protect users from abuse and prevent retaliation." Users protesting the change said the most crucial aspect of blocking - keeping a stalker from seeing what you are doing on Twitter - had been removed, making everyone vulnerable to harassment or abuse. Under the change, they said, the only way to prevent stalking by people you had blocked would have been to make your account private, which defeated the purpose for many of being on Twitter. Feminist Zerlina Maxwell started a petition on Change.org: "Twitter: Don't Make Life Easier for Harassers." "This is a huge and very serious problem for people, like me, who have received repeated rape and death threats on Twitter on a fairly consistent basis," Maxwell wrote. Twitter is no longer a safe space. As a public person who uses the medium for my work, I am very concerned because stalkers and abusers will now be able to keep tabs on their victims, and while there was no way to prevent it 100 per cent before, Twitter should not be in the business of making it easier to stalk someone. Executives rushed into a meeting on Thursday night (US time) at Twitter's San Francisco offices to discuss the uproar, a rare event for a company that for the most part has historically been hailed for championing its users, who now number more than 250 million worldwide. Although Twitter has made unpopular design tweaks, it has maintained a better policy record than social media rival Facebook, which has repeatedly upset users over the past decade with abrupt changes to its privacy policies. Fairfax Media/Los Angeles Times/Reuters