by
Tracy Chou
December 23, 2021
This year, the trolls were busy — but so were we. Here are just a few highlights from the Block Party year in social media safety.
Block Party first debuted in early 2019 with a waitlist— and we kept it in place for longer than many other young companies might. As we’ve described before, this was an intentional choice to help keep our users safe.
We were delighted to reach a point in our journey this year where we could open up signups to a larger group of people, without compromising on our commitment to safe design practices.
When you’re facing an onslaught of harassment, you should spend as little time as possible managing trolls. We made a suite of new features to help you reduce time spent wading through your mentions in moments of crisis.
Block lists help you easily block accounts that like or RT a specific Tweet, or import custom lists and block in bulk. We also introduced other bulk actions, to relieve some of the burden of managing high volumes of unwanted mentions in your Lockout Folder.
Inspired by the many requests we received from members of our community wishing to support and protect those who might need safety tools most, we now offer the ability to purchase gift subscriptions for someone else who is experiencing harassment.
We will continue to make our product available to as many people as we can, regardless of ability to pay.
Sometimes we encounter people who have a skewed idea of what ‘online harassment’ actually means in practice. They may think it’s just a couple rude comments here or there— something to shrug off. And although at Block Party we think any unwelcome mention is one you shouldn’t have to see or manage if you don’t want to, this perspective also dramatically misrepresents what it’s actually like.
Consider these numbers. In 2021, the most unwanted mentions Block Party filtered on behalf of a single user was 196,197.
The most filtered for a single user in a single day was 13,939.
13,939 unwanted mentions in a day is roughly 1 every 6 seconds. Imagine trying to walk down the street and a new person getting in your face every 6 seconds.
No one should have to experience harassment— at this or any level. We approach the new year with renewed commitment to giving everyone the tools they need to feel safe joining the conversation on social media.
We can’t wait to make your experience on social media even better in 2022.
