Dear Amy: The #SMEtiquette of the Twitter Block

I often call blocking and unfriending the "nuclear options" of social media, and for good reason. The other person generally knows you've done this and often will feel quite offended by the action.That's not to say it's never appropriate - and I explore the Twitter block in this week's installment of Dear Amy.Don't forget! Submit your questions.

Dear Amy:Is it OK to block someone on Twitter if they haven’t done anything rude to me?I Wanna Block

Dear I Wanna:Yes. If you want to block someone on Twitter, you have every right to. It can be a tricky thing, if you have a prior relationship with this person, and shouldn’t be done lightly, but there are many reasons you might want to block someone.Example 1: You don’t like this person and don’t want them to see your tweets, but don’t want to have a private account. This could be an ex, a former employer, or just your childhood enemy.You should keep in mind that he can still see your tweets if he is not signed into Twitter, but you would be sending him a message that you don’t want him around. Just because you’re on social media does not mean that you have to be connected to people you don’t want to be connected to. And just because there are some people you don’t want around doesn’t mean that you have to shelter your own account and make it difficult for others to connect with you.Example 2: This person kind of creeps you out. She favorites half your tweets every day – many of which are not the sort that you’d expect anyone to favorite, such as when you tweet “Thanks” to someone who is not that person. When you ask her why she’s doing this, she never responds. She might be a bot, she might be a stalker, she might just be weird.It’s a bit creepy, to have someone monitoring your activity in such an odd way. If she responded to your query and had some sort of an explanation, well, then, maybe you’d leave it at that. But she doesn’t, and that makes you believe even more that she’s a bot. So, the block button can be your friend.Example 3: This person is an obvious spammer or bot. After you tweet about your iPhone, you get a response with a link. You don’t know this person, but her bio looks OK, and photo looks like a reasonably normal looking woman. Oh. But she’s following 1,978 people and only 3 are following her back.Yeah, that’s probably a bot (if you do an image search for her profile photo, you very well may find it on a stock image site). Not only should you block her, but you should also report it to Twitter for spam.Example 4: This is someone you know, and possibly have known for some time. It gets a bit trickier here. Perhaps he became oddly abusive in his language. Perhaps she tried to pass off your tweets as her own.Some people exhibit strange behaviors online, behaviors you wouldn’t expect from them in “real life.”If you know this person well and the behavior is unusual, you might try reaching out to him by other means first, to see if everything is OK in his life. Maybe he’s had a really bad day or gotten devastating news and is just lashing out. While that’s not OK, it can be understandable, and you can maybe even become closer by showing you care.If you don’t know the person well enough to feel comfortable doing that, then blocking probably is the best option. You don’t have to put up with abusive behavior for the sake of being “polite.” There is never any reason to put up with abusive behavior online and the block button can be your friend there.Look, your accounts are your accounts. You can treat other people however you want to. Go crazy with the block button. But turnabout is fair play, and you could find yourself blocked out of other conversations if you block people for no real reason.Do what’s right for you. If you feel uncomfortable having a connection to someone, block him or her.