Elon Musk is about to remove a feature that has been a staple of the social platform.

Soon, it will no longer be possible to block replies from unwanted followers or strangers, even though it was a long-standing security feature, Musk wrote on Twitter. Blocking will not disappear completely, as it can still be applied to private messages (which are also restricted, as not only the number of tweets you can read per day is limited, but also the number of DMs, direct messages you can have). So if there is someone we don’t want to see our posts when logged in, there will be no way to prevent them from seeing what we post in a private window or logging out this way unless we set our account to private (locked).

Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, an investor in Musk’s Twitter, tweeted, saying that bots and spam problems should be addressed first before removing the blocking feature. Louis Jones, director of media and advertising at the Brand Safety Institute, said Musk’s latest plan could be a cause for concern because users could be exposed to spam, threats, and other harmful content. Musk’s attitude to free speech could have different effects: harassment could become more common, and free speech could be restricted for those harassed, putting Twitter on a downward spiral and making it unsuccessful in the long term.

Musk has also been met with an approving response from Twitter’s former head and founder, Jack Dorsey, but it might be sarcastic commentary from him (as there was no mention of blocking being removed while he was running the site). It raises the question of when Twitter will be kicked off smartphones, as blocking is an expectation on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, and under Musk’s tweet, this fact was highlighted in a fact-checking Community Note post.

No wonder Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino stressed that they are working on a better feature than blocking…

Source: CNBC, Dexerto