I don’t think it’s too strong to say that Elon Musk purchasing Twitter (sorry, I’m not calling it X just yet) is one of the most positive developments for society in the past decade. One of the world’s top social media platforms without a thumb on the scale tipping the flow of information leftward is massive, and Community Notes alone do more to effectively combat propaganda than anything the Republican Party or national conservative media have come up with in, well, ever.

That said, Musk has recently started teasing a change that could blow up all the progress he’s made so far. As I covered on LifeSite last week, for reasons that he hasn’t really made clear, Musk wants to remove the ability to block other users from engaging with your public posts, arguing that merely muting them is sufficient to deal with trolls. This got an overwhelmingly negative reception, and with good reason — the results would be a disaster.

While blocking can of course be abused to shield oneself from valid criticism or inconvenient arguments (I’m proud to have amassed a rogue’s gallery of blockers for precisely that reason), it ought to be every user’s prerogative to determine how much of their time and attention they devote to strangers on the internet, no matter their reasons. Further, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for wanting to cut off certain people from interacting with you: malcontents and trolls who reply with nothing but ad hominem or intentionally waste your time with repetitive bad-faith claims, abusive or stalkerish people who spew venom or even threats at anything you post, cretins who pollute your tweets and discussion threads with foul language or imagery, and run-of-the-mill bots and spam that slips through the cracks.

Muting, which stops you from seeing them but doesn’t stop them from tweeting at you, addresses none of this. Not even the best content moderation in the world can catch everything that shouldn’t be allowed, and users’ reasonable standards for what they’re willing to put up with can easily differ from the platform’s rules. Indeed, robust user controls to tailor their experience to suit their preferences and sensibilities is the alternative to the heavyhanded censorship practices that Musk bought Twitter to stand against.

Without the ability to protect oneself from bad actors, targets would have no recourse but to make their accounts private or readable/followable by request only. For millions of us, that would defeat the purpose of being on Twitter in the first place, and kneecap Musk’s stated vision for the platform as a virtual public square (in physical public squares, stalkers don’t have the right to invade someone’s personal space to the point of breathing down his neck, with the victim unable to do anything about it).

Since the announcement, Twitter software engineer Aqueel Miqdad suggested they “can make mutes stronger, like not allow people you mute to reply or quote you. We can also transfer you block list to mute list.” Musk later endorsed “strengthen[ing] the mute function,” albeit without confirming exactly what that would mean. If Miqdad’s statement really is what we can expect, that the essential function of muting will be kept and simply renamed “muting,” then this really is much ado about nothing (except for Musk and company failing to make that clear from the outset). Either way, the sooner they clarify, the better.

They’re right that keeping the blocked from seeing your content is worthless; that can be circumvented simply by reading from a different account or opening Twitter in a browser without logging in. But at a minimum, a user’s ability to cut off unwanted interactions should be considered non-negotiable.

Tread carefully here, Elon. Take the fears seriously. You’re making great progress toward making Twitter the best social media platform on the net; it would be a shame if one false move turned it into one of the worst.