Surprise, surprise. X-formerly-Twitter owner Elon Musk is implementing yet another brain-meltingly dumb change to his social media platform by rendering the block function completely pointless and opening the floodgates for even more harassment.
In its new form, “blocking” someone still allows them to view your posts and your profile, tearing down an important way for some users to protect themselves against abuse on the site.
And it appears that for many users on the fence about staying on the site, this was the last straw.
Right after the changes were announced, BlueSky, a competing platform founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, proclaimed that it had received more than 100,000 new users. Barely twelve hours later, that tally climbed to half a million, the company said Thursday — and it’s not showing signs of slowing down.
In fact, the influx of signups grew so feverish that the website temporarily experienced an outage.
Bluesky, for its part, is relishing in rubbing in Musk’s blunder.
“At Bluesky, we take online safety seriously,” the social media platform’s official account wrote on X. “If you want to block someone, you can!”
This is definitely not the first time that there’s been an exodus of Twitter users under Musk’s leadership. A similar wave of people tried to join Bluesky the moment it hit the Apple and Android stores last year. And in general, X’s user base has been steadily declining since his takeover.
But the single most impactful incident was probably Musk’s dispute with Brazil’s top court, which led to Twitter being banned in the country after the billionaire magnate refused to comply with a judge’s orders to remove accounts accused of spreading misinformation.
Musk blinked first and eventually complied to get the ban lifted. But the damage was done: Bluesky gained over three million new users within days of the ban, the overwhelming majority of whom were Brazilian.
Such is Musk’s proclivity for shooting himself — and his businesses — in the foot, while handing his competitors an advantage. Bluesky developers even reportedly have a name for when one of Musk’s decisions leads to a deluge of newbies, according to journalist Joshua J Friedman: an EME, or “Elon Musk Event.”
In a long list of questionable stuff Musk has done with the platform, the change to the block function is definitely up there. The feature will now only prevent blocked accounts from liking, replying, and reposting your tweets. But if your account is public, they can still see anything you post.
This is a decision that Musk has been mulling over for at least a year, tweeting last summer that blocking, in its typical form, “makes no sense.”
We’re now getting treated to some additional insight as to why that’s the case. Apparently, it’s the people who are doing the blocking that are the real problem, because they can use the feature “to share and hide harmful or private information about those they’ve blocked,” the platform’s engineering team tweeted.
People who would rather not get harassed or stalked see it differently. Blocking is pretty much the only tool for people to protect themselves against malicious individuals on social media. While users facing a barrage of harassment on X still have the ability to go fully private, some need to stay public for job reasons. Now, those accounts have lost a useful way to stay under the radar.
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