Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BlackAura 4086 days ago
Nope. Completely opt-in.

Most of the people on these block lists are... I'm going to charitably describe them as "trolls". Generally, accounts are added for harassment, abusive or threatening behavior, outright hate speech, deliberately triggering someone's PTSD symptoms, encouraging specific suicidal people to commit suicide, and that kind of thing. Oh, and trying to evade a block, or encouraging others to harass someone.

On any even lightly moderated discussion forum, these users would have been banned. Most of this is actually against Twitter's TOS, and theoretically could be grounds for suspending an account, but Twitter doesn't really do anything about it. They know it happens, but haven't come up with any kind of workable solution yet.

Most of the users of the block lists are people who have been targetted by those same trolls, and who have chosen to just ignore them.

The people using the block lists tend to be women (especially feminists), various racial minorities, LGBT people (and related activists, especially transgender people), and various other marginalized groups. They are pretty much universally harassed for what they are, and for standing up for themselves against the standard pervasive sexism / racism / whatever.