Twitter will no longer notify you about replies in conversations started by people you’ve either blocked or muted, Twitter said today. You will, however, still get notified if someone you follow directly mentions you in the thread.
Twitter made this decision after hearing “consistent feedback from the safety community regarding notifications from conversations started by people you’ve blocked/muted,” Twitter Safety posted on Twitter today.
“If you mute an account you do not follow and they start a conversation that mentions you, you will only receive notifications from those you do follow who reply in the conversation and mention you,” Twitter writes on its support page. “If you’d like to view all of your mentions, you can do so by searching your username.”
To be clear, blocking someone means you’re not going to see their tweets and they’re not going to see yours. With muting, you might want to mute someone who tweets abusive or other types of harmful content, but don’t want to give the abuser the pleasure of knowing they’ve gotten under your skin. If you mute someone, you won’t see their tweets and they won’t know you’ve muted them.
This comes after Twitter announced that it would make a number of changes to fix abuse online. Earlier today, Twitter started putting some online abusers in “Time out” as part of its anti-abuse measures.