Billionaire X owner Elon Musk on Friday said the platform will no longer allow users to block accounts, marking his latest change to Twitter in the 10 months since he closed on his massive US$44 billion purchase, and as he comes under fire over concerns around Twitter’s moderation policy.
X Owner Elon Musk said on Friday the platform, previously known as Twitter, will no longer allow users to block other accounts.
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Key Facts
Musk confirmed the change in a post on X Friday afternoon, saying users will still be able to mute other accounts and block users in their direct messages, and claiming the feature “makes no sense.”
Under the new policy, X users will no longer be able to restrict individual accounts from contacting them, following them or seeing their posts.
By muting an account, users effectively remove that account’s posts from their timeline—without blocking or unfollowing them, according to the platform.
Key Background
The move is Musk’s latest in a series of transformative measures, including the creation of a paid Blue subscription model, restricting X Pro—formerly known as Tweetdeck—to Blue subscribers and changing the name of the platform from Twitter to X, while directing the domain X.com to Twitter. Last month, Musk replaced Twitter’s iconic blue bird with the letter X, in an apparent effort to embrace his long-sought-after “everything app.”
What We Don’t Know
Whether Musk will walk back on the change. Watcher.Guro, the outlet Musk responded to on X, asked Musk whether he would create a poll for users to weigh in on the cancellation of the blocking feature. Musk has not yet responded, though in December, he relied on the poll to survey users over whether he should step down as the company’s CEO, after facing pushback over its moderation policies and after a series of advertisers cut ties with the platform. More than 57% of respondents in that poll said he should step down, and in May, Musk named former NBCUniversal head of advertising and partnerships, Linda Yaccarino, as the company’s new CEO.
This article was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
