My good friend Jo Brodie has written a summary of things you may not realise about Twitter and what happens when you block someone or when someone blocks you.

If someone blocks you, you can log out of twitter and still see their tweets or use the search function to find their updates. Similarly, if you’ve blocked someone they can still see your tweets by logging out themselves or searching.

Twitter horror image via Shutterstock

All blocking does is remove someone from your follower list and prevent them from contacting you from their blocked account using a direct message (DM) or @ mention. However, if you block someone they can still put @yourusername in a tweet and it will be seen by the other people who follow you and they.

All of this means, that blocking is essentially like holding your hands over your eyes when you’re watching the scary bits of a horror movie, you can always peek through the gaps in between your fingers.

Blocking a person does not make your tweets invisible to that person, it does not protect your privacy. The only way to make your tweets private is to lock your account…but that’s almost like switching off your TV or leaving the cinema…

Jo has much more detail and explanation on all of this on her blog: What happens if you block someone on Twitter? What happens if they block you?.