After her own experience with abuse on social media, Tracy Chou (triketora) founded Block Party, an app that helps users manage online harassment
It’s a path that led Chou to spend months coding, an app she launched in January 2021, which provides users with fine-grained protections to filter out abuse from Twitter accounts that are likely to be owned by trolls: new accounts, those without profile photos, or those with fewer than 100 followers. A premium version of the app offers even stricter filters.
That comes, in part, from Chou’s experiences collating the abuse she received on multiple platforms to share with police as evidence to use against her stalkers. “It was bad the first time you had to see it, and then it’s retraumatizing to go through it again,” Chou says. “There’s a lot of folks who just respond by deleting all of it—they want to make it go away—which then makes it even harder to do anything later.
Big Tech companies have a habit of copying successful features pioneered by smaller competitors—from Instagram Stories or Twitter’s discontinued Fleets to Reels . Chou indicates she is confident that the big platforms won’t make Block Party defunct by copying its functionality. “The incentives for these companies are almost always growth and engagement,” she says. That means that thethat might get more users, rather than improving safety.
Block Party works only on Twitter right now, but Chou has plans to expand the service to Instagram and other platforms. Over time she hopes it can become a kind of one-stop shop for online safety, where a user can coordinate their filters across lots of different apps from one place. She also wants to diversify the services on offer, making it even less likely that a boardroom decision at a social media behemoth sinks her business.
For now, Chou’s Twitter experience has been vastly improved by having Block Party activated on her account—particularly after an “Ask Me Anything” event on Reddit led to her receiving torrents of abuse on the platform. “The one place that actually felt safe was Twitter,” she says. “It was really good for me to have a place where I could still engage with a supportive community.”