Back in September, Elon Musk the owner of X, formerly Twitter, said on his own platform that the block function will be changing. Specifically, people that you’ve blocked won’t be able to interact with you, but they will still be able to see your public posts. This change appears to have gone live, according to some reports, as well as our own testing.
One example of the former comes from Engadget, with its decade-long beef with Canadian actor William Shatner. The news outlet claims that staffers got blocked by Shatner back in 2014, but is now able to see posts made by him, even if the ability to follow or message the actor on X remains off limits. We’ve tried it amongst ourselves, blocking each other as a test. And we see exactly what’s being reported.
On one hand, most of the functions of a block is still in place – you can’t repost, like, share or bookmark posts by someone who has blocked you. On the other, the fact that public posts are still visible allows for some of the above to be circumvented via screenshots, which the X app allows. One way to get around this is to set your account to private instead, letting only followers see what you put online.
It’s been over a year since Musk first entertained the idea of not allowing users to block one another, with direct messages being the only exception. What we have now is a lot more than that, so it’s a lot more than just a glorified mute. But it also remains to be seen if things can stay this way, without X running afoul of policies by the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
(Source: Engadget)
