Elon Musk is right: blocking is no solution to abuse on Twitter
Elon Musk’s reply to a Twitter user about the difference between block and mute, saying that his network will remove the option to block users, which is most people’s response to bullying, trolling or spammers, unleashing a Twitterstorm.
As somebody with more than sixteen years’ experience on Twitter — now X — having found myself trolled, harassed, spammed, insulted, threatened, and much more, blocking users is a poor solution to a problem that needs to be given serious thought, which is what has been going on for many years.
Blocking somebody on Twitter prevents them from mentioning you using your account, and in addition, you can no longer see their updates unless you ask to. The result, in general, is that you no longer feel stressed out, but not because the abuse has stopped — this can continue to be carried out without mentioning the user’s account — but because you can’t see them anymore. This is what most people do; bury their head in the sand.
With spam, it is worse: if, as is my case and other popular accounts, a bot factory chooses to target your account with automated spam, blocking is useless: first, because the bot farm can create dozens of new accounts every day, and second, because all that happens is you don’t see the spam, but it is still there. Again, the…
