Elon Musk’s TwitterX has once again made headlines for the wrong reasons. The last bastion of real protection for users on the platform is now a half step away from vanishing. As regulators struggle to use inadequate laws to reign in the rogue platform, how can decent users cope with no real digital protection?
The tech entrepreneur claims that allowing blocked users to see your public posts is to create fairness for blocked users. He cites blocked account may experience harmful posts about them from the blocker of their account. The current blocking process allows for this view where the ‘I am mentioned’ scenario occurs per their help documentation reviewed today, 18th October, 2024.
The current process document states: “If you block an account and they choose to report your account, any of your posts that directly mention them will be available for them to view and attach during the reporting process.” The soon to be rule change is moving from relatively fair to grossly unfair.
Digital Abuse As A Weapon
In the last five years, Russia, China, Iran and other headline acts have conduced digital subversion assaults on democratic societies. They have been sensationally successful via social media. Trusted social media platforms allowed persistent and malicious campaigns to occur, building in efficacy over the years with no strategic reach-out to law enforcement or intelligence services of note.
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When governments in democracies are seeing digital subversion as a national security threat, Elon Musk allows visibility of your posts by those you block? So, instead of enforcing robust user safety programs, he strips them away so the user-block is the last impactful protection for users on TwitterX.
Regardless of free, or paid premium plans, your posts will soon be visible to anybody you block. This allows those who have digitally abused you to a point where you blocked them to soon review your public posts.
Digital Subversion Delivers Digital Abuse
At scale, this is strategically impactful to the mental health of a society. On TwitterX, you must either accept the risk, or protect your posts. If you do the latter, only your followers will see your content posted. Also, the reach potential of TwitterX’s premium plans becomes effectively redundant.
Digital authoritarians can learn more and more about you, to do basically two things. First, they can manipulate you via a repetitive string of carefully crafted posts to install fear of an action, such as disagreeing with a manifesto or agenda. Second, they can manipulate you via the same method to install anger, and trigger you into taking a pre-defined action you otherwise would not take.
The latter is considerably more difficult, and not possible to do without the former. What Elon Musk is doing in this change directly aids such digital subversion. We now know it is often part of hybrid warfare strategies used by authoritarian nations, who are hostile to democracy, which they view as a threat.
Self Protection Against Digital Abuse
Learn about digital subversion, and become information resilient. Don’t look at social media for the first and last 30 minutes of the day. When you otherwise do, and feel compelled to respond in anger, do not! Take a breath, then a minute, and if in doubt, do not respond until that anger has left you. A common tactic for the troll and digital authoritarian alike is prevarication.
Finally, nobody has a perfect track record in handling this form of digital abuse. Social media abuse gets to us all, and it’s up to us to remember this. Even if you do everything wrong or right, forgive your own mistakes, and learn from them.
The more we learn, the less they can harm us, but if you feel overwhelmed, remember the most important lesson about information resilience. If your fear and anger do not subside up to 30 minutes after being on social media, disengage. Take a break from all platforms for at least 48 hours.
Your mental health is worth more than your time spent struggling with digital abuse. It’s within your power to protect your personal freedoms from malicious influence by these digital subversives. When you come back refreshed to social media platforms, you will be more learned and resilient than before.
About the Author
John is a versatile author known for his gripping fiction narratives in the thriller, action, and suspense genres. With a background as a journalist since 2016, and expertise in cloud technologies as an engineer; John brings a unique blend of storytelling prowess and technical acumen to his work.
Elon keeps making poor decisions with Twitter/X. If I block someone, it’s either because I don’t want to see their posts (but now it seems like I can) or I don’t want them to see my posts (which now they can). The only thing they can’t do is reply to the posts but what good is that?
Also, this is a good reminder to take breaks from social media.
I agree Karalee. This move only serves those with malicious intent. The block will make your posts viewable to those you block, but they cannot interact with you. Thats the current claim of Elon Musk for X. The implementation in my view is a half-way house to a full stripping of user protection on the platform. I suspect part 2 is contingent on Donald Trump been elected in November’s US presidential elections.
The threat I see is from this move is to allow them to read your posts and collaborate in groups to target you on the platform and possibly on other platforms depending on their reach. Regulators have inadequete laws for now, but I suspect Elon Musk’s actions will change that, certainly in Europe, the UK, and maybe even the United States.
Social media started out as a very positive concept, but avarice and dark ambition has ruined it for so many. Managing hostility and subtle manipulations of one’s own mind is no longer an option. We all need to manage our social media use in order to stay mentally healthy. The damaging aspects to it are truly alarming, especially when one thinks of the time it took for it to evolve into the threat it currently is.