Since Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, he tends to buck all marketing conventions and sometimes makes unexpected announcements about the site’s future in completely automated posts or comments. Now he has surpassed himself in this genre. Based on his posts, he is currently in Japan where, at midnight local time yesterday, he stated in a comment below a post on Tesla’s fan page that he would remove the possibility of blocking the site.
In practice, this may mean that you cannot block trolls, bullies, spammers, or anyone in general from commenting on a post. The former president and founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, immediately showed up and commented approvingly — though the idea wasn’t universally enthusiastic, to put it mildly, among other commenters.
Finally, the Community Feedback Addition was released during Musk’s announcement – Twitter/X’s voluntary fact-checking community that operates much like Wikipedia, with the right to add fake news comments, clarify, contextualize, or even refute any content on the site and links; It always appears prominently. This time, the authors of Community Notes put their boss in an uncomfortable position, informing him that the blocking functionality for social media apps is mandatory in the Apple and Google app stores as an essential tool for protection against harassment. If an application does not exist, it will not appear in stores, which means in practice that it is excluded from almost all smartphones in the world.
All of this also reclassifies Dorsey’s comment into the trolling category, since he led Twitter for 15 years, so it was clear he was aware of that rule as well. It’s a good question what Musk will do now, will he try to get out of the situation by developing something much better instead of withholding, or will he forget about the whole thing and go back to his favorite topic that Mark Zuckerberg dares not do. Stand up to fight against him.