Elon Musk Prepares To Turn X (Formerly Twitter) Into A Trolls’ Playground

“It makes no sense,” Elon Musk announced Friday via his social network. Those who viewed the billionaire’s post to X might have hoped he was referring to his proposed brawl with Meta chair Mark Zuckerberg or his decision to change Twitter’s name to X or his money-losing purchase of the company in the first place. (Or a multitude of other things he’s said and done.) Those hopes are all for naught, however, as the allegedly senseless thing Musk is now seeking to destroy is one of the only things left that makes X endurable for those with large followings: the ability to block other users.

According to X’s own “Help Center,” the block function is intended to “control how you interact with other accounts on Twitter” and “helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them.” As Kotaku reporter Gita Jackson wrote in 2018, the platform’s “safety measures are notoriously lackluster” so blocking other users is often the only way to avoid targeted harassment from specific people. 

It’s also a good way to stop those harassers in their tracks, Jackson notes. “Even some of the more persistent angry people who show up in my mentions, the kind who take a screenshot of the block they’ve received to tweet something like ‘I guess I touched a nerve,’ lose interest once there’s a stumbling block for further engaging with me,” they write.

But according to Musk, his company will soon remove that stumbling block. Instead, he seemingly says, users can “mute” an account, a function that means a user can essentially remove another user’s remarks from view, but does not prevent another user from seeing their activity on X. 

In essence, it’s like covering your eyes and ears when someone is yelling awful things at you: they can keep on yelling in your face, you just don’t know they’re doing it. But if Musk moves forward with this plan (anyone’s guess, given the number of announcements he makes that never pan out), the only way a user will be able to remove themselves from a harasser’s view will be to remove themselves from the entire public conversation, by making their entire account private.

The social media company’s former CEO, Jack Dorsey, appeared to endorse the change, posting “💯. mute only” in response. But according to a “Community Notes” entry added to Musk’s block-blocking announcement, Dorsey might also be applauding the final nail in his old company’s coffin.

That’s because, per the note, “If the ability to block users was to be removed, X would be in violation of the policies of the App Store as well as the Google Play Store. Potentially, this could lead to X being removed from these platforms.”