Elon Musk, owner of site formerly known as Twitter, announces that users will no longer be able to block comments from unwanted followers.
Elon Musk, owner of Twitter which is now known as X, announced on Friday that users of the social media website will no longer be able to block comments from unwanted followers.
Blocking will only be available for direct messages, Musk stated as he announced another controversial decision in a series he has made since taking over the site.
“Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs,” Musk wrote on Friday in response to a post from the account of Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, which asked, “Is there ever a reason to block vs mute someone?”
Musk did not provide a reason or a time frame for eliminating the block function, only saying in a subsequent post that “it makes no sense” and that the mute function will still be available.
Musk has made a series of controversial changes since taking over the platform. One of his first product moves was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month, but the social media platform was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, causing Twitter to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.
The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of its iPhone or Android apps.
In April, Twitter removed blue checkmarks from many high-profile users who did not pay the monthly fee to keep them.
Later, Twitter announced that its users will soon need to be verified in order to use TweetDeck, which was previously free and is widely used by businesses and news organizations.
That move came days after Musk announced that unverified accounts in the Twitter Blue program (that do not pay for a monthly subscription) will be limited to reading only 600 posts per day, compared to verified accounts which will be able to read 6,000 posts per post per day. That number was later increased.
Musk explained that the reason for the move is “to deal with large volumes of information mining, or ‘scraping,’ and system malfunctions.”
Source: Arutz 7
In a later post, Musk explained that the new limitations placed on Twitter usage are meant to combat addiction to social media and encourage people to look up from their phones.
Twitter was rebranded as X last month. Musk’s connection to the letter X goes back 24 years when he founded X.com, which later was renamed PayPal despite his objections. His space company is called SpaceX and the parent company of Twitter was changed to X earlier this year.
(Israel National News’ North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)