Elon Musk Prepares To Turn X (Formerly Twitter) Into A Trolls' Playground | Vanity Fair

“It makes no sense,” Elon Musk announced Friday via his social network. Those who viewed the billionaire’s post to X might have hoped he was referring to his proposed brawl with Meta chair Mark Zuckerberg or his decision to change Twitter’s name to X or his money-losing purchase of the company in the first place. (Or a multitude of other things he’s said and done.) Those hopes are all for naught, however, as the allegedly senseless thing Musk is now seeking to destroy is one of the only things left that makes X endurable for those with large followings: the ability to block other users.According to X’s own “Help Center,” the block function is intended to “control how you interact with other accounts on Twitter” and “helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them.” As Kotaku reporter Gita Jackson wrote in 2018, the platform’s “safety measures are notoriously lackluster” so blocking other users is often the only way to avoid targeted harassment from specific people. It’s also a good way to stop those harassers in their tracks, Jackson notes. “Even some of the more persistent angry people who show up in my mentions, the
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