It has been rumored for a while that Elon wants to remove the official “block” functionality on ExTwitter, but now it’s official. The company has announced that it will soon start rolling out a new version of “block” that no longer blocks content, only interactions.
That’s ExTwitter’s engineering team saying:
Soon we’ll be launching a change to how the block function works. If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).
Today, block can be used by users to share and hide harmful or private information about those they’ve blocked. Users will be able to see if such behavior occurs with this update, allowing for greater transparency.
This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, though I’d push back on people calling it a “crazy” idea. There actually is some logic to it. As many people will point out, even with the existing “block” functionality, you can still see the content in question if you just switch to an incognito view. And, of course, there is something slightly odd in posting some content publicly, and then expecting that certain people should be “blocked” from seeing it.
That’s the theoretical argument for why what Elon is doing here seems to make sense.
But reality and theory don’t always match up. The reality is that the current “block” feature acts as a form of friction to stop abuse, and it’s somewhat, though not perfectly, effective in that role. That friction does not stop abusive people from viewing tweets or passing them along, but it does seem to help in some form.
The simple fact is that (even though Elon probably doesn’t know this or care to look at the history), Twitter tried this. A decade ago. And it was a complete flop. Such a flop that Twitter backtracked almost immediately.
On Thursday, the social site tweaked the way users block others who harass, spam or otherwise bother them. Under the change the blocked user would still be able to see the profile and tweets of the other user, as well as retweet their posts.
By Thursday night, however, the change was gone, reversed in stunningly abrupt fashion after a flurry of user protests, on a platform perfectly suited for both flurries and protests.
Part of the issue is that the block feature is a somewhat crude tool for dealing with multiple forms of abuse. Some of that abuse is still stopped via the new version (blocking interactions, but still showing content), while an awful lot is not. That’s the real problem. While block is far from a perfect tool in stopping people from ganging up on and abusing people, it does help. And with the new changes, that mostly goes away.
This plan is taking away an important, if imperfect, tool for stopping abuse, while not providing any alternative. It’s likely based on Elon’s near total inability to have empathy for people who are not himself. Over and over again, he has shown that he thinks the real problems on ExTwitter are just the ones that impact him directly: spam and scam repliers (even though he’s made that problem worse).
He has no concept of marginalized and targeted people and the kinds of abuse and attacks that can be heaped upon them. Thus, a tool that works towards minimizing such an impact is not even remotely interesting to him.
At the same time, it’s been said that the legacy blocking system is expensive computationally, because figuring out who can (and who cannot) see certain tweets is a pretty complex issue. I’ve noticed that this system breaks a lot since Musk took over, in that in the last few months I have repeatedly seen tweets from people who block me.
So, what this seems to come down to is (1) Elon trying to reduce more costs as the company continues to collapse, combined with (2) an inability to understand or care about the actual harassment that happens on his own platform. It doesn’t seem like a recipe for success.