A basic feature of any social network is not suiting Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter). He said the block option will go away, meaning you won’t be able to block accounts.

“Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature’, except for DMs,” Elon Musk posted. When asked by a Tesla fan account if there is a reason to use block instead of mute, he followed it up with: “Makes no sense.” Millions of people use the block feature to stop harassment and has been a key safety feature of the platform. In fact, the company writes on its help page: “Twitter gives people a variety of tools to control their experience, including blocking. Blocking helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them. If you have been blocked by another account on Twitter, you can still block other accounts (including any that have blocked you).”

Musk has been batting for anti-block steps for months. In June, he posted: “Blocking public posts makes no sense. It needs to be deprecated in favour of a stronger form of mute.” The owner of the platform also believes: “The giant block lists are problematic. They mess up the recommendation system and create a DDoS vector.”

There is a mute option but it’s not the same as blocking. If you block an account, you will not have anything to do with that account. Mute only hides your posts from their stream and users are not made aware that they have been muted.

The problem with Musk’s idea is that Apple and Google both suggest that social networking apps need a block feature. Google Play developers must provide “an in-app system for blocking [user-generated content] and users” and iOS developers must provide “the ability to block abusive users from the service”.