- Elon Musk says the block feature will be "deleted" from X, formerly Twitter.
- Musk's posts suggest X users will only be able to block others from direct messaging them.
Block lists may soon become obsolete for users of X, formerly known as Twitter.
The platform's owner, Elon Musk, announced plans to do away with X's block feature in a series of posts on Friday. The owner said blocking "makes no sense."
Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 18, 2023
In the post, he noted that capabilities of the feature will be stripped down to only being able to block another user from sending direct messages. As it stands, user can block one another from seeing each other's posts and profiles.
Musk has notably had a rocky relationship with the block button in the past. After purchasing Twitter in October 2022, he quickly made a series of changes to the social networking site. Since the takeover, sweeping changes at X — including its new name — haven't been well-received by some users.
In November 2022, some of the platform's users who once had Musk blocked or muted alleged that the billionaire's posts mysteriously began appearing on their feeds again, Bloomberg reported. They claimed that the measures they took to restrict Musk were no longer in place when they checked his account, suggesting Musk had made a change to unblock himself from users' feeds.
Months later, in February, Musk said he chose to unblock everyone he'd personally blocked over the years. Forbes contributor Matt Novak, who said he had been blocked by the Tesla CEO in 2019, reported that Musk's tweets were no longer hidden from his account.
Musk's posts on Friday aren't the first time the billionaire has expressed his distaste for the block feature — he said something similar in June.
"Blocking public posts makes no sense," Musk wrote at the time. "It needs to be deprecated in favor of a stronger form of mute."
In another Friday post about the changes to blocking, Musk clarified that the mute feature — which allows you to hide tweets from a particular user or those that contain specific words in your timeline without having to unfollow or block — will remain.
You will still be able to mute accounts and block users for DMs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 18, 2023
It's unclear when this change will go into effect at X. Insider's request for comment from X was met with an automated response.