Say it’s around the time that the newest Marvel movie came out.

You haven’t watched the movie yet but people are tweeting spoilers about the movie. You grumble and mute a handful (plus block the more aggressive ones) so you won’t hear back from them and ruin your experience once you do have the chance to watch the movie. At the same time, you also stumble upon some tweets that pop up to you as bothersome. You also block them so you won’t hear back from them again.

But what happens when you take another look at your list days later? How do you remember when and why you decided to block or mute them?

BlockThem is a Chrome extension for heavier Twitter users (including social media managers) that displays a list of the people you blocked and muted, along with the date and why you did so. If you’re viewing the page of a person you blocked or muted, it also displays that information.

Use BlockThem to help cut down on timeline toxicity, forgetfulness, and spoilers for an upcoming movie you’d like to watch.

Inspiration

BlockThat’s inspiration comes from a tweet by Twitter user hullojess:

Twitter needs a feature that lets you make a note of why you blocked someone. There's a difference between a "keeps posting Marvel movie spoilers" block and a "thinks women don't have human rights" block.

What it does

Type the name and description of why you are blocking someone. And it'll save into your Chrome instance!

How we built it

We used Javascript, HTML, CSS.

Challenges we ran into

We had some difficulties in terms of using google's asynchronous storage API for retrieval

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learned something new!

What we learned

How to make a chrome extension

What's next for Block Them

Block Them may be extended to cover other social networks beyond Twitter, such as Facebook and Instagram. Block Them would use an OAuth instead of having to manually input it. By using an API, we can potentially prompt the user to describe why they're blocking someone when they're interacting with social media. BlockThem would allow people to set reminders about unblocking/unmuting.

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