“Free speech” as the right to force other people to listen to you whether they want to or not
By It was always headed in this direction, as it’s clear that Elon bought Twitter not just to allow white supremacists, anti-trans fanatics, anti-vaxxers, etc. etc. back on the site, but to put their content in as many feeds as possible:
Elon Musk’s latest tweak to Twitter, the former name of what he now calls X: Users will no longer be able to block other accounts — as Musk claims the feature “makes no sense.”
“Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs,” the tech mogul posted on X Friday. “Makes no sense.”
X/Twitter describes block as “a feature that helps you control how you interact with other accounts on Twitter. This feature helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them.” Blocking other accounts is useful if someone is harassing, threatening or stalking you on the platform.
As for whether this latest move to make the user experience for most people worse will mean the “death of Twitter,” I fully endorse Cheryl’s point that this is entirely contingent on someone coming up with an actually functional replacement. Zuckerberg had a golden opportunity and produced an alternative that is absolutely worthless. I hope that Bluesky succeeds, but as of now my posts on it get virtually no engagement, not enough people are on it to replace Twitter’s very real value as a news source, and as long as it remains invite-only network effects are going to seriously limit its value (while being the one thing Elon still has going for him no matter how badly he keeps screwing up.)