Twitter users report X to Apple and Google amid Elon Musk's plans to finally scrap 'block' feature

In the latest instance of Elon Musk-owned Twitter/X further descending into chaos, the platform has announced it will be doing away with the standard ‘block’ functionality – a move which has seen yet another surge in sign-ups to rival platform Bluesky and users reporting the app to Apple and Google.

X’s Engineering account shared on Wednesday (16 October) that the social media site would soon launch “a change to how the block function works”, whereby blocked accounts “will be able to view [posts], but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.)”.

It added that the current setting enables users to “share and hide harmful or private information about those they’ve blocked”, while the new update will mean users can “see if such behaviour occurs” which it says allows for “greater transparency”.

‘Protected’ accounts, which require a user to have a follow request accepted by an account in order to see their tweets, are unaffected.

The planned change comes more than a year after Musk declared the block feature “needs to be deprecated” and replaced with “a stronger version of mute”, writing in June last year that “blocking public posts makes no sense”.

At the moment, blocking stops an account from viewing your tweets, while ‘mute’ means the user – provided you don’t follow them back – can still interact with your posts without you being notified about it and them being aware of that fact.

Musk then recommitted to ditching the feature in August 2023 when he stressed it is “going to be deleted as a ‘feature”, except for DMs”.

And now it looks like that is happening but people are once again pointing out that the removal of a block function on a social media platform goes against policies set out by both the Google and Apple app stores, with many filing reports to the tech giants to get the app taken off both.

To make matters worse for Musk and Twitter/X, competitor Bluesky announced on Friday (18 October) it had seen half a million new users join its decentralised social media platform within a day.

As if the blocking wasn’t enough, other users have criticised Twitter/X’s AI policy in which users grant the platform rights to use, reproduce, download and distribute content shared on the site to train its “machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type”.

Indy100 has approached both Apple and Google for comment.

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