The owner of the service formerly known as Twitter says blocks are going away, except in DMs.
Elon Musk isn’t quite done making major changes to X. The platform’s owner and chief technical officer says the service formerly known as Twitter is getting rid of the option to block other users, except for when it comes to DMs. Musk, who has previously signaled his desire to remove the feature, suggested it “makes no sense” to block other users instead of muting them. The mute option will still be available.
Many people use the block feature to protect themselves from harassment. It’s long been a key safety feature of the platform and nixing it opens the door to users perhaps seeing more hateful content they don’t want to deal with in their feeds and notifications. Moreover, as CNBC points out, some users block advertisers and brands they don’t want to see, which (were enough people to do that) could have a notable impact on X’s bottom line.
In the spring, X killed off the platform’s free API, which broke many third-party apps. Just one year earlier, Twitter (as it was known at the time) started recommending third-party apps for people to use to mitigate harassment on the platform. One of those tools, Block Party, has since abandoned Twitter in the wake of the API changes.
On a related note, soon after Musk posted about the plan to remove the block function, rival service Bluesky went down. It may be that more X users are looking for a life raft as the platform becomes less palatable for them.
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