Blocking People on X Is Officially Pointless
After confirming in September that lockdown as we know it would soon disappear from X, Elon Musk’s social media company began rolling out the changes over Halloween weekend. This fundamentally changes the way you interact with the site from now on, so let’s spend a little time on how blocking worked on X, how it works now, and what you can still do to protect your content from prying eyes.
How blocking used to work on X
Previously, blocking a user on X prevented that user from interacting with or seeing your posts at all. They won’t show up in the blocked user’s feed, and if all goes well, that user won’t even know you posted.
This was not a panacea because if your posts were public, that user could easily log into another account and see them elsewhere. But it served as a preventative measure, forcing anyone who wanted to spy on you to try their best to do so. It also prevented blocked users from following you, sending you direct messages, adding your account to a list, sending you notifications, or tagging you in photos.
How X blocking has changed
Essentially, blocking on X retains most of its features, except for the most obvious: blocked accounts can now see your messages .
This allows blocked users to follow you without switching to another account, as long as your posts are public. According to the site’s owner, Elon Musk , “the blocking feature will block that account from interacting, but will not block viewing public posts [sic].”
In other words, a blocked account will not be able to like, reply, repost, or otherwise interact with the public post or the person who wrote it, but they will still be able to view it (and take screenshots).
A quick look at replies and quotes from tweets surrounding Musk’s announcement shows the move was controversial, although Musk himself said, “It’s long overdue.” However, please note that it may take some time for the update to take effect. When I tried to block one of my concurrent accounts from my main account, that account was still unable to view messages from my main account.
Overall, this is a bit of an unusual move and it will be some time before we know if it sticks. The Apple and Google stores require apps with user-generated content to have built-in blocking functionality, and it’s unclear whether Musk’s new rules meet those requirements. For example, while Google states that an app must include “internal functionality for blocking users,” it does not specify what exactly that blocking functionality should look like.
How to keep blocking users on X
It’s possible that in the face of Musk’s changes, we’ll see Apple and Google clarify what exactly the blocking feature should include. However, neither company has yet made public statements on this matter. In the meantime, you can take one step to prevent the wrong people from seeing your messages.
Unfortunately, the most obvious step will turn your X account into a more simplified version of Facebook: for now, the best way to ensure that offensive posters don’t see your X posts is to make your account private.
X calls it Protecting Your Posts , and on desktop, you’ll find a toggle for it in the More menu in the sidebar under Settings & Privacy > Privacy & Security > Audience & Tagging . On mobile, tap your profile picture and scroll down to Settings & Privacy to find it.
On the desired page, you will see a toggle for Protect my posts and a toggle for Protect my videos . Protected posts and videos will only be visible to your followers, and you’ll see a lock icon next to protected accounts. You’ll also need to approve any future followers, although any followers you’ve already accumulated will still be able to see and interact with your posts. Reposts of your posts will also be greyed out and will no longer show up on search engines or when people who don’t follow you search for them on X.
In other words, you will essentially limit your account to interactions with friends and family. This removes some of the features that make X different from older social networks like Facebook, but can be useful if you don’t want to lose the friends you’ve made there. However, X’s biggest competitors still allow you to block as usual.
How blocking works in Threads and Bluesky
Oddly enough, I saw a sharp decline in posts after Musk announced that he would change the way the blocking works on X, with many of my mutual friends leaving the site and moving to Threads or Bluesky. With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at how blocking works on these sites in case you want to follow suit.
In Threads, blocking prevents users from seeing or interacting with “everything you post” and also removes their likes from your posts and prevents them from mentioning your username or tagging you. The only complication is that since Threads is on Fediverse , you will need to request to block users on other servers before they stop seeing your posts. For example, to block someone on Mastodon, you need to go to Settings > Privacy and enter the username and server in the External Server Username section, then click Submit Request . Meta can’t promise that the server will process the request, but it’s a start.
If you want something more secure, you can try blocking Bluesky. Here, blocking will prevent you and the blocked account from seeing or interacting with each other’s posts. Trick? Your entire blocklist will be available through the app’s API, which can lead to some awkward interactions if you know the person you’re blocking in real life.
And that’s all. Blocking on these public platforms has always been about putting a barrier between offensive eyes and your content, rather than preventing them from viewing entirely, so it’s always best to remain vigilant even on platforms with stricter blocking features. Alternatively, if you’re not quite ready to block someone, you can take less aggressive action against them, such as muting them or limiting their posts so they don’t show up to you until you start looking for them. They also tend to be more private, since blocked users will know they are blocked as soon as they go to your account and see that they are not allowed to view or interact with your content.