Elon Musk is very open about his idea of freedom of speech and has bypassed many requests from the government and courts to ban certain accounts. He has termed these orders as a violation of freedom of speech and has multiple times said that his platform X (formerly Twitter) stands for absolute freedom of speech. Now, his social media platform X is changing how the block option works on the platform.
X is making changes to the way replies are visible in the context of a block. Previously, when a user blocked someone on X, they could still reply to their posts. However, the person who was blocked would not be able to see that reply or know that the person who had blocked them was engaging with their posts. This is now being changed, so that users will be able to see direct replies even if the person posting has blocked them. In a post from X's engineering team, the company stated that this change is in line with their commitment to align the block feature with their principles as a public town square.
The post hinted that there may be additional changes happening to the block feature, one of the most widely used safety features on the service. According to the post, their objective is to enable users to control their experience while still keeping the public visibility of posts. This aligns with Musk's previous comments, as he has stated on multiple occasions that a public-facing "block" feature "makes no sense" and that "block is going to be deleted as a 'feature,' except for DMs."
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has blamed the bot operating for the degradation of content quality on the platform. He threatened to pause advertisement revenue sharing for some creators until an investigation is conducted into the use of bots to spam likes, replies, and direct messages (DMs). Musk made this comment in response to an X user who mentioned that "Ad Sharing payouts for the last 2 weeks are going out now!"
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