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You may have blocked someone on X, but they can now still see your public posts.
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You may have blocked someone on X, but they can now still see your public posts.

Elon Musk’s X has been changed so that accounts you’ve blocked on the social media platform can still see your public posts.

X updated his Help Center Page this weekend to explain how blocking on the site now works. Although you can still block accounts, those accounts will now be able to see your posts unless you have made your account private. However, they will not be able to respond to them or republish them. Blocked accounts will also not be able to track you and you will not be able to track them, as was the case before the policy change.

Additionally, if the owner of an account you blocked visits your profile on X, they may learn that you blocked them.

X said the change was intended to protect blocked users.

In a post on his Engineering account on the service, X said the blocking feature “can be used by users to share and hide harmful or private information about those they have blocked.” Users will be able to see if such behavior occurs with this update, allowing for greater transparency.

But critics say the changes could harm victims and survivors of abuse, for example. Thomas Ristenpart, a computer security professor at Cornell Tech and co-founder of the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, said being able to control who sees their messages can be critical to the safety of domestic violence survivors.

“We often hear about social media posts allowing abusers to stalk them or trigger further harassment,” he said. “Removing users’ ability to block problematic individuals will be a huge step backwards for survivor safety.”

Since taking over the old Twitter in 2022, Musk has relaxed policies the platform had in place to crack down on hate and harassment. In moves often seen as being carried out in the name of free speech, he dismantled the company. Trust and Safety Advisory Group and restored accounts that were previously banned for hate speech, harassment and spreading false information. When a nonprofit research group documented a rise of hate speech on the platform, X sued them. The trial was rejected.

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