Block count?

[Dean Collins]

Can you tell from the API how many people block a twitter account?

(how about how many people block your own accounts?)

 

 

If twitter don’t provide tools to help combat spam soon they are going to fall into a chasm of uselessness.

 

 

Cheers,

Dean

 

 

 

[Taylor Singletary]

There is no direct way to get this information from the API. The API will contextually indicate the accounts the "current user" blocks but it does not go the other way. 

GET http://api.twitter.com/1/blocks/blocking.json and GET http://api.twitter.com/1/blocks/blocking/ids.json are the relevant methods.

Aggregating and surfacing this information for purposes outside of the "current user" context would definitely be a case of "surprising users" though. Data about who a user who has blocked should remain private to that user alone.

Taylor 

--
Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc
API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi
Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk

[Dean Collins]

Thanks for the reply Taylor. Maybe what I was trying to explain was…. Is there anyway that I can check to see if an account has been blocked by more than 100,1000 etc accounts

 

Don’t need to know who blocked them, just need to know this is probably a suspect account and like SURBL I should also treat accordingly.

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers,

Dean

 

 

---

[Taylor Singletary]

Unfortunately not. 

Our Trust & Safety team is working on problems with spam; I trust they will continue improving this landscape. It's a multi-pronged problem of course: disincentivize spammers, make spamming more difficult, better detect spam, better filter for relevance, better empowering users to report spam. 

I'm not sure if I'd consider blocks the best signal in regards to spam. People block for many reasons.

Taylor