American billionaire Elon Musk has announced that he wants to remove a function on X (ex-Twitter), a social network he owns, which allows messages from certain accounts to be blocked. “Block will be removed as a feature, except for DMs,” Elon Musk said Friday, referring to direct messages (“direct messages”) between users of this social network.
This function is intended to restrict exchanges between certain accounts on the platform. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October, renamed X, for 44 billion dollars, has always justified the changes introduced on the platform by his desire to encourage freedom of expression as much as possible.
Since its takeover by the American billionaire, the social network, used worldwide by personalities of all persuasions, has seen its advertising revenues collapse, in part due to this encouragement of all forms of expression, including including hate, and the return of extremist user accounts.
According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), hate messages are again flourishing on the platform, which X, who has filed a complaint against the CCDH, denies. Elon Musk reopened in December the account of former President Donald Trump, who was banned from the platform in early 2021 for his role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6 of the same year by a group of his supporters challenging the result of the 2020 presidential election that gave victory to Joe Biden.
