Twitter, latterly known as X, is limiting the effect of blocking. Blocking people will no longer stop them from seeing tweets, though it will continue to hide them from the blocker and prevent interaction.
Musk has been vocal about his dislike of the block button. Last year, he said the feature "makes no sense" and that "it needs to be deprecated in favor of a stronger form of mute." He also threatened to stop letting users block people on the platform completely, except for direct messages.
There are reasonable arguments. Blocking people from viewing public tweets falsely implied privacy while being simple to circumvent, encouraged contextual abuses such as posing screenshots of blocks to encourage harassment, and was a hacky compromise.
That said, he's more likely getting rid of blocking views for other reasons: because he wants to encourage the kind of user that people often block, because his conception of free speech amounts to "you must hear us," and because in aggregate blocking does moderate brigades, mobs and other disruptions. But the passage below, from the recent book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, rather implies the first principle in play: Musk himself ran into one block too many for his liking.
Attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, Musk had one of the most luxurious seats in the house, but rather than watching the game, he was glued to his phone in dismay. Both he and President Biden had sent tweets cheering on the Phila-delphia Eagles, but even though Biden had far fewer followers than Musk on the platform, the president's tweet garnered 29 mil-lion views to Musk's 8.4 million.
Livid, Musk demanded that his engineers find out why his tweet was underperforming Biden's. He left the game early to fly back to his San Francisco office, where dozens of employees were summoned to meet him on a Sunday night. Eventually, to placate their boss, the engineers tweaked Twitter's algorithm to boost Musk's posts, pushing them into users' feeds whether they follow him or not.
"In effect, Musk's tweets would have higher priority over any other post," write Conger and Mac, technology reporters for The New York Times. As they put it toward the end of the book, "A man allergic to criticism had bought himself the largest audience in the world, and hoped for praise."
Leaving aside the tantrum described here, it's interesting that neither Musk nor anyone at Twitter seems to have figured it out. Followers of the President are normal people into normal things like sports. People following Musk are less normal, and less likely to engage with tweets about football. All they could see was numbers.
Advertisers hated blocking, too. But the new blocking setup doesn't make a difference to that (the blocked remain unseen) and, well, most of the advertisers already left on account of what's now on Twitter.
