Can this new app filter out Twitter harassment?

January 15, 2021 1:41 PM

BlockpartyApp has opened on producthunt.com Founded and launched by Tracy Chou after her bad experiences on Twitter. Every woman, PoC and queer person on Twitter needs this app.
You can ask a friend for an invite (requires an email address), or you can use this special invite for Product Hunt members for the next 24 hours. Whichever way you join, a phone no. is required for 2fa.
posted by Lanark (12 comments total)

These shared block/mute lists have been around in one form or another since Twitter enabled blocking and then muting.

Although, since they keep greylisted content in a holding pattern you can refer to later, I guess they aren’t blocking, just doing their own form of muting.
posted by sideshow at 1:51 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

The difference is that this automates the process via a set of rules you define, so you don't have to laboriously block/mute every one of hundreds of trolls.
posted by Lanark at 1:54 PM on January 15, 2021

The issue with this is that you have to trust the people behind it. I recall the story of a big blocklist that got heavily promoted, that blocked people who targeted women. Wil Wheaton endorsed it, which caused a lot of people to use it. Then curation of it passed on to some TERFs who quietly added pretty much every trans person on twitter to it.
posted by Canageek at 2:18 PM on January 15, 2021 [15 favorites]

Blockparty does not share any blocklists between users. If they did turn rogue at some point you could just disallow the app in Twitter security settings. OK I will stop threadsitting now.
posted by Lanark at 2:35 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Firstly to clear this up from the main post: a phone number is not required.

Upon first login you will be prompted for one, but there is a small link in the text above that lets you switch to "app". I am honestly not sure why they made SMS the default for 2FA when this is known to be a lesser option and been recommended against for years now. (I want to hold it against them, but simultaneously: good on them for forcing 2FA at all!)

Not fully sure what the draw is supposed to be yet. The ability to filter tweets through muting while continuing to use any Twitter client you want? Some clients have had filtering and muting abilities for years, sometimes better than what is advertised here. E.g. Tweetbot has been doing keyword and hashtag filtering for a while now, something only "on the radar" for Block Party.

Definitely an interesting concept, having a secondary Twitter client running in the background at all time to handle muting for you, while you continue to use Twitter as you always have.

Some other random observations after clicking around a bit:

• Under Settings there is a "Plan & billing" page that reads: "Block Party is a subscription service. Billing setup coming soon". So before fully committing, maybe wait a bit to know which features will be free? Neither the Product Hunt post nor there Product Hunt announcement email linked from there mention anything about the business model.
• Why do I need a username (that starts with an @?) for use withing Block Party? Isn't the whole idea that I can forget Block Party exists while it runs in the background?
• Instagram is already under Settings, showing a little bit of the future, so if that is your platform of choice you may want to check back in a few months.
• Apparently I now have a "Public profile" on Block Party? Although that profile page is inaccessible if I am not logged in, so not really public? (Maybe someone else with an account can confirm.) Either way: your Black Party account name is going to automatically copy your Twitter avatar, so linking it to Twitter/Instagram may couple your Block Party account name to your social media account in a convoluted way.
• Why did I just give a third-party platform access to my direct messages? None of the filters seem to be about that. And last I recalled (this may have changed though!) Twitter had DMs as a whole separate permission.

All things together I think I am going away from this with the feeling that it was very much a Product Hunt announcement. It really feels to me like a social media world start-up product that after a year of closed beta has yet to find a business model but invites more people to join in for the sake of growth alone. It does not feel like something that solely exists to combat harassment. Maybe I have just grown cynical. I do hope people find great use for this tool!
posted by Martijn at 2:42 PM on January 15, 2021 [8 favorites]

I'm friends with the founder and know several people who have been using Block Party for awhile. Reports are positive; basically it's a set of more advanced filtering tools than Twitter itself provides. Just being able to block on simple filters like "new accounts" or "folks without any followers" can be a big help. Note the plan is to expand eventually beyond just Twitter.
posted by Nelson at 4:01 PM on January 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Twitter's model is fundamentally broken and no amount of shared blocking tools is going to fix that, and I hope, now that Twitter is finally banning the Nazis, that people will notice that the problems aren't going away.

If it takes them a while to notice, I guess this will be useful in the interim. I'm not really in the target audience for this.
posted by Merus at 5:57 PM on January 15, 2021 [2 favorites]

Block lists can absolutely be used as tools of harassment if they are shared. Anyone can make them and most people using them won't bother to check if the accounts they are blocking are really guilty of the crimes they are accused of. They can be used to punish (or threaten to punish) dissenters and homogenize opinion within a cult, like the terf/radfems cult.

And I think it's a dangerous process to automate, but there are way too many bots, trolls, spammers, and harassers on twitter. So I don't know the solution. The number one thing that improves the twitter experience for me is using lists to read posts sequentially and only putting real people, who I know are real from another website, on my twitter lists. But this is the kind of handcrafted solution that won't work at scale, and if twitter keeps being used as a forum for public opinion we'll need one that works at scale to keep the commons from being overrun.
posted by subdee at 8:04 AM on January 16, 2021

i’m getting the most disgusting racist and misogynist harassment for launching @blockpartyapp_ yesterday.

This is one reason there aren't more tools out there for protecting people from harassers online. The toolmakers get harassed.
posted by Nelson at 8:06 AM on January 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

…now that Twitter is finally banning the Nazis, that people will notice that the problems aren't going away.

Perfection isn't achievable, but moderation works¹. MetaFilter itself is a great example.

¹ The Washington Post: "Misinformation dropped dramatically the week after Twitter banned Trump"
posted by ArmandoAkimbo at 4:21 PM on January 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

What Merus said.

Every time I hear someone suggest we move to a new social media service, I'm now like "... or maybe I don't really want social media at all? Maybe chat apps are fine?"
posted by gusandrews at 6:29 PM on January 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oh yeah, moderation works; the problem is that Twitter's model and core appeal is that it puts you in direct contact with people with whom you share no values in common, which is fundamentally unworkable. To be able to have a respectful exchange of ideas, you need to have some common ground. That common ground ends up being different for every community, so you can't have a social network for everyone where everyone can contact everyone else without people having their common ground being brought into question every time they come into contact with people outside their community.

A few years ago I'd argue that, to build a social network where people could be happy and safe and build great communities, you had to allow people to form their own communities and decide on their own norms, but let things cross over. I eventually realised that this was a description of Reddit.
posted by Merus at 10:54 PM on January 17, 2021