Charles Langston:You may have blocked someone on X but now they can see your public posts anyway

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

X updated its Help Center page over the weekend to explain how blocking now works on the site. While you can still block accounts, those accounts will now be able to see your posts unless you have made your account private. They won’t, however, be able to reply to them or repost them. Blocked accounts also won’t be able to follow you and you won’t be able to follow them, as has been the case before the policy change.

In addition, if the owner of an account you blocked visits your profile on X, they will be able to learn that you have blocked them.

X indicated that the change was aimed at protecting users who have been blocked.

In a post on its 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’ve 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 instance. Thomas Ristenpart, professor of computer security at Cornell Tech and co-founder of the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, said it can be critical for the safety of survivors of intimate-partner violence to be able to control who sees their posts.

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

Since he took over the former Twitter in 2022, Musk has loosened policies the platform had put in place to clamp down on hate and harassment. In moves often said to be made in the name of free speech, he dismantled the company’s Trust and Safety advisory group and restored accounts that were previously banned for hate speech, harassment and spreading misinformation. When a nonprofit research group documented a rise of hate speech on the platform, X sued them. The lawsuit was dismissed.