💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 11-05.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Elon Musk turns X’s block button into a "glorified mute button"
We're starting to launch the block function update
Twitter's engineering team posted the above two days ago. And thus began the change that Elon Musk has wanted for a while, to see the block function reduced to barely more than the existing mute. I'm surprised he didn't have them remove it altogether.
The change allows users to see all the tweets of people who have blocked them. They can't interact, but in a sense, that doesn't matter - it's an enormous violation of privacy, one that allows anyone who's been blocked to see what they've been missing. Sometimes blocking is done capriciously - when I was on that site, I'd often block someone the moment they barged into my mentions. But sometimes it's done for a real good reason. Think threats, and stalking. Deranged randos. Creepy exes. People have for years been writing tweets with the expectation that the worst people in their lives can't see them. That's no longer the case, and this is all timed, very coincidentally, with election day.
I think it's pretty clear that Musk had someone run a report on how often he personally has been blocked, and, wanting to reach as many people on election day as possible, decided to do something about it. I've already started to see more and more people on Bluesky. I'm hopeful (as always) for a collapse, but given everything that's happened the last two years, it's clear that most people will stay there until the lights go off.
People are talking about how this could be an app store violation for both Google and Apple, that this could get the Twitter app taken way, blah blah blah blah blah. It doesn't matter. We live in the age when only the proles fuck around and find out. I'd love to be proven wrong, but solidarity among the moneyed classes will ensure that nothing comes of this, or, at least, just a fine. Half a million, two million, twenty, who cares. When you're a billionaire, fines don't matter. They're like pocket change for you and me. But the implications of this change matter deeply when you're someone who travels without a dedicated bodyguard team, who lives in a physical world full of physical consequences. A lot of people are feeling a lot less safe right now.
But that said, it's clear right now, and has been for a long time, exactly what Twitter is. What Musk is. He's amplifying fascist propaganda, flouting election laws, making the world considerably less safe for millions of his site's users. And if you're still on Twitter, you have a choice: you can stay, thereby lending your approval (and usage metrics, and data) to the site's owner and his policies; or you can lock your account, or delete it, and leave. Join Mastodon, join Bluesky, even (ugh) join Threads. But we're long past the point of maybe-this-is-temporary, maybe-it'll-come-back-to-what-it-was. The old Twitter's gone. It's never coming back. So now whether you stay on Twitter or leave is a test of your morality. And there's nobody that can make you leave but you.