Just when you thought he couldn’t make it any worse, Elon Musk has delivered.
The owner of X has already run the social media platform that he bought into the ground financially, but he’s still hard at work in the lab hatching up new ways to make it even more unpleasant. His latest innovation: changing the block feature in a way that makes users more vulnerable to harassment and abuse — and generally makes the platform a worse user experience.
Yet again, Musk seems profoundly out of touch with the average user experience.
Under the previous feature, if you blocked someone, then that account could no longer see your account or your posts or interact with them. Now the block feature is being made softer: If you block an account, it can’t interact with your posts but it can still view your account and posts. It's unclear exactly when the change will take effect throughout the site, but X has been notifying users that it will be changing soon.
That might sound like a small change but it’s significant. Blocking is a tool that can help you wall off users who harass, stalk or bully you. The change makes it easier for bad actors to track what you’re saying and — especially in the case of a big account — send waves of harassers in your direction. Ultimately it increases the user’s vulnerability to abuse and doxing.
A robust block feature is especially important for users who are particularly vulnerable to abusive or predatory behavior, such as women, members of the LGBTQ community and young people. A report by Thorn, a tech nonprofit combating child sexual abuse, notes that minors “use blocking and leverage it as a tool for cutting off contact in an attempt to stop future harassment.”
Musk’s softer block feature isn’t the worst thing in the world. It can still serve as a meaningful deterrent to abuse. Moreover, the old block feature was not an insurmountable wall against abuse. And ultimately, users can always make their account private to try to avoid a storm of harassment.
But what it reveals is that, yet again, Musk seems profoundly out of touch with the average user experience. Who was asking for this? How is user experience improved by this? It’s unclear what Musk’s motivation was except for perhaps a gradual effort to undo blocking altogether, considering he has said he thinks blocking “makes no sense.” (A complete ban would likely put X at odds with Apple’s and Google’s app store regulations, which require blocking features for safety purposes on social media platforms.) Moreover, blocking is not only a feature for mitigating harassment, but also helps users customize their feeds so they can avoid spammy or undesirable content. The new block feature weakens user tools for avoiding soul-deadening promotion from influencers and bots.
Musk runs X like a mercurial philosopher king, making grand declarations about principles such as free speech and then making a mockery of those principles. His gutting of the platform’s protections against spam, harassment, malignant bigots and misinformation has triggered a mass exodus of advertisers and users. Musk doesn’t appear to view X as a public square but as a private playground — and he doesn’t seem to care how filthy it gets.
On top of all this, Musk’s full immersion in his efforts to get Donald Trump back in the White House — which includes tens of millions in funding for a pro-Trump political action committee — has further tilted the mainstream culture of X to the right. After an independent reporter published an article containing a hacked dossier of research compiling Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance's political weaknesses, the Trump campaign reportedly reached out to X and subsequently Musk suspended the reporter's account and blocked a link to the article. (Musk later reversed the suspension of the reporter's account.)
All signs point to Musk definitively changing the culture of X in a way that he will not be able to come back from. His indifference to the most basic values of running a social media company well seems to be driving people over the edge: Within a day of Musk announcing the change in the block policy, Twitter’s top social media competitor, BlueSky, saw more than half a million sign-ups. Maybe Musk is fine with this prospect: the shrinking of X into a right-wing cesspool, whose primary rival isn’t the major social media platforms, but Trump’s Truth Social. But it wasn’t the stated plan Musk began with — assuming there was a plan at all.