Elon Musk has made a terrible decision as the owner of X. In other news, the sky is blue.
On Sept. 23, it was announced that X would be changing its block feature. Blocking a user can mean different things depending on the social media site, but it generally stops someone from being able to see, find or interact with someone online.
Musk stated in a reply, “High time this happened. The block function will block [an] account from engaging with, but not block seeing, [a] public post.”
This is not the first time that Musk has expressed a desire to remove the block feature. Last year, Musk stated, “Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs.” Fortunately, a Community Note was added to his post, affirming that Musk cannot do this, as the feature to block someone is a requirement for social networking services to be on the Apple store and Google Play store.
So what makes Musk think he can do this? Clearly he believes he has more power from owning X than he actually does. Not to mention that removing the ability to stop someone from interacting with another person sets a bad precedent. If someone is being stalked, harassed or abused on the platform, they will now have no way to stop that person from viewing their posts and spinning the narrative. It is not surprising that the ability to block is mandatory for social media apps. Musk has no idea the damage he might cause in the unlikely event that the block feature is removed.
Furthermore, in light of Musk’s behavior throughout his tenure as owner of the platform, a lot of users have already blocked him.
Again, Musk is no stranger to bad decisions. From changing the iconic name of the platform from ‘Twitter,’ to driving away advertisers from his platform, he simply cannot stop making changes to his platform that just make it worse. Is he trying to play out some sort of power fantasy? It makes one wonder if he is doing all this on purpose, because it truly is a skill to make awful decisions as consistently as he does.
