What’s Distinctive about Blocking Implicit Toxicity Online

Social philosophy of language has recently focused on counterspeech—communication that tries to counteract the harm that toxic speech brings about. An especially interesting counterspeech move is blocking, which is able to address implicitly communicated toxic content—typically by spelling out and challenging the objectionable material, thus preventing it from entering the common ground by default. To properly characterize the features of blocking—its workings, its assets, its costs, and its drawbacks—we need to distinguish how it operates in different contexts. In this work, I explore the specificities of blocking when it is performed on social networks, as opposed to face-to-face conversations. I consider four features that help us navigate the specificities of online blocking—time, space, audiences, and identities—and illustrate how its assets, costs, and drawbacks are distinctively modulated online.