Yes, In Theory, Elon Could Be Cooking Up Something Better Than Blocks, But In Reality…

You might have heard late last week or over the weekend, that Elon was getting rid of the “block” feature on exTwitter. Elon had tweeted on Friday claiming “Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs.” But, uh, he had said basically the same thing back in June. I know this because I wrote about it back then. For whatever reason, the mainstream media finally picked up on it this weekend and there were dozens of news stories all about how Elon was going to get rid of the block feature. For his part, Elon loved every minute of it, agreeing with a user who pointed out he was getting free publicity for it: Amusingly, the Community Notes program, which Elon loves, pointed out that both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store say that social media apps are required to have a block function, suggesting that if he did actually get rid of block, he might run into a spot of trouble. Apple’s developer guidelines note that any service that hosts user-generated content is required to include “the ability to block abusive users from the service,” but I’m not sure that applies here. From the context, it looks like it applies only to the ability of the service provider to block users, not other users. The Google Play guidelines are more direct and say that you need to “provide an in-app system for blocking UGC and users,” so he might run into trouble…Yes, In Theory, Elon Could Be Cooking Up Something Better Than Blocks, But In Reality…