Twitch announced earlier that it will allow live streamers or channel managers to block specific account users from viewing, as part of Twitch's efforts to eliminate malicious harassment.
Trevor Fisher, senior product manager at Twitch, said that this feature is not enabled by default and is expected to be officially launched in the next few weeks. At the same time, the blocking criteria are based on the account rather than the user's network IP address. Therefore, for malicious harassment users, they can still watch the live content by changing to another account or logging out of the account.
While it's impossible to completely eliminate malicious harassment, it can at least reduce the direct impact on live streaming content. Twitch also provides a one-click anti-harassment tool, strengthens the online harassment reporting mechanism, and readjusts community usage guidelines in the hope of maintaining the quality of Twitch's live streaming service, and even using artificial intelligence technology to combat the spread of fake content such as Deepfake.
On the other hand, "X", formerly known as Twitter, recently removed the blocking function it originally provided, presumably to increase content interaction and thereby improve the exposure of advertising content, resulting in users' posts being seen by those originally blocked, or being continuously harassed by users of specific accounts. Although "X" still retains the mute function, making uninteresting content disappear from its dynamic updates, this move may still violate Apple's App Store and Google's App Content Regulations on the Google Play Store, which include that social platform-related apps must provide blocking and closing functions for user-generated content to help users reduce the appearance of offensive content.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino stated that they will create better features than the previous blocking and muting features, allowing users to have a better content browsing experience. However, X has not yet disclosed the specific approach, and Apple and Google have not yet responded to X's plan to remove the blocking feature from its service.
