Just get off it people. Easy to solve.
Before someone says “but you can mute those toxic asshole”. Muting them means they will continue to see your posts and will still berate you, other people will reply quoting you and you will not only continue to see the toxic content, but you will become a target to more and more assholes with nothing better to do in life
Its all part of the plan. EM does one outrageous thing each day to constantly stay in the news cycle. The ego must be fed.
Oscar Wilde described this mentality in The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
He can’t push his apartheid propaganda if people refuse to read it, right? Dutchie is just missing one thing… you don’t have to use Twitter. Free yourself from the site, and it no longer holds any power over you.
It’s super easy to say “just don’t use the site,” but you gotta understand that that’s a lot like saying “just stop hanging out with your friends” when they invite some neonazi to every get-together. Yeah, obviously it’s what you have to do, but it still absolutely blows, especially if you don’t fit in with anyone else.
It does absolutely blow, but sometimes, you absolutely need to do it. I left Twitter after fourteen years of dedicated use, I left Reddit after four years, I was forced to leave Miiverse when it closed after five years. None of that was fun, and I’ll probably not see some of the people I left behind again, but sometimes you just run out of options.
Dude I don’t care how long I’ve known the person, if I find out they are inviting neo Nazis to parties then I am fucking gone.
Truly a mystery why he would do this… /s
What’s the over under on how many days until he backtracks this wonderful idea? I’ll put it at 5. I choose over but only because I think that’s how long the coke and benzo binge will take to wear off.
I can imagine the conversation.
Elon: “I own this website, and you’re telling me that I’m not allowed to see this person’s profile or activity because they blocked me?”
Good luck getting a massive narcissist like him to understand why every user should have that right.
“Why is the engagement on my posts so low?”
“Well your Excellency, the great and powerful Musk, the users have blocked you.”
“They can’t do that. How else will they bask in my magnificence?”
“We tried ignoring the block and showing your posts anyway, but we had to reverse that decision unfortunately.”
“I have it! Remove blocking completely for everyone!”
“You are most wise. It shall be done, your Excellency.”
This is not in any way a “threat to public safety” but it’s still a cringe decision.
The inability to block users actually makes moderation even more necessary and makes it harder to allow “free speech.”
Holy shit, “In His Latest Threat to Public Safety”, that’s in the actual headline. I want this to become a trend.
EDIT: I want the trend of calling out Elon on his bullshit in the headline. It is a threat to public safety because blocking people stops them seeing your tweets, and using mass tagging apps to do so reduces your profile to groups of unhinged right wingers. When you get their attention en masse they might hurt you because they create basically all of the domestic terrorists, and everyone is a member of the public. This isn’t difficult to figure out, guys. If you can’t understand it then you don’t want to.
But go off, tell us more about how much you hate the lying press.
Bro is completely unhinged
So let’s say someone is harassing and abusing somebody on the platform. Blocking gives the victim a recourse. Let’s say someone with an extreme ideology, such as a Nazi anti-semite, consistently posts hate at a jewish person. Blocking gives the victim a recourse. Blocking is an essential feature of social media, and Musk is a complete idiot.
If Musk really does this, instead of backtracking off it, he’ll really kill the site. He had never realized that the way he uses Twitter is NOT the way that everyone does. He can’t see past his own nose, and no one there will tell him no.
I reckon he’ll either latch onto the Apple and Google TOS as an excuse to backtrack when it finally gets through his thick skull that this is a terrible idea, or he’ll double down on it because no one tells him what to do.
Ok but how is that a public safety risk?
You never saw how many toxic people are over there? Once they brigade on a target they can easily push someone to suicide
I feel like it could be considered dangerous for some people. For someone who faces harassment regularly, taking away the option to block people means making them choose between a) dealing with constant online harassment, or b) leaving the only online community you know. At the very least, this change will be severely detrimental to some folks’ mental health, while providing absolutely no benefit to anyone.
It could also be a public safety risk because twitter is a place where many people get news about natural disasters and severe weather. The people who are forced off of the platform because of this change will lose a valuable aggregate of information, and when it gets removed from app stores for violating their TOS (they require that social media services allow blocking), even more people will be without that information.
I like this since it forces people who do not like having their world view shaken up to have their world view shaken up. This will either limit echo chambers on the platform or cause people to leave Twitter. Most likely cause people to leave Twitter which I am all for since it is a big tech spyware platform filled with toxic people.
Nostr is were it is at! Not mastodon.
BTW I do not have a Twitter account nor do I use Twitter.
I agree with the sentiment, but it doesn’t hold up in reality.
Having any sort of engagement with rightoids results in your feed getting filled with Nazi shit.
You obviously don’t use Twitter if you think well-argued/constructive challenges to worldviews are the sorts of things people need the blocking feature for.
For some twitter users use the blocking feature to live in a echo chamber. For some it is to block spam. For some it is to block rude people.
The con of no blocking feature is not able to block spam.
Im all for it, if it means that government 3 letter organizations cant demand block of users either…
Has the DOE often demanded one Twitter user block another?