Elon Musk wants to remove the ā€˜blockā€™ button on X, formerly known as Twitter. That would be a huge mistake.

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In May, after I wrote extensively about the Citi Bike Karen incident, I was doxxed repeatedly, and when I reported a few of the accounts on Twitter, I got a response back saying they had found no violation in the personā€™s tweets.

Iā€™m not the only one. 

Black women are targeted for abuse daily on the app as are members of the trans community and the LGBTQIA+ community at large. Racists, Trumpers and everyone in between look for every opportunity to try and make someone elseā€™s day miserable. I spend a lot of time blocking accounts in order to protect my peace.

Marginalized communities already face an onslaught of abuse on Twitter, and with this latest decision, Musk is proving that he doesnā€™t care. 

It is highly likely that his desire to remove the ability to block people is directly tied to people blocking him (it obviously hurts his little feelings that no one cares to read what he has to say) and a large-scale campaign to block Twitter Blue users who pay to have their tweets prioritized over everyone else. 

And since the introduction of tweet monetization for that same user base, the rage farming has increased as blue checkmark accounts try to incite people into engaging with their content so that they may suck at the teat that is Twitterā€™s ad revenue ā€” or so Elon has promised them. 

Elon Musk wants to remove the ā€˜blockā€™ button on X, formerly known as Twitter. That would be a huge mistake.

Bye, legacy Twitter verification

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Ever since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he seems to be on a mission to destroy everything good about the app one bad decision at a time, and his latest stunt proves that he is a nincompoop who deserves to lose the $44 billion he spent on the worldā€™s most expensive online game of idiocy ā€” which is what he has turned Twitter into since becoming the CEO. 

Elon has been promoting Twitter Blue for a while now. Twitter describes it as, ā€œour premium subscription service that elevates quality conversations on Twitter.ā€

How exactly it ā€œelevates quality conversationsā€ is unclear, especially given that one of the perks for joining is receiving a blue checkmark on your account. Receiving the blue checkmark is a highly promoted perk of the Twitter Blue service, and is likely the biggest draw for those who have already elected to join it. 

Elon Musk can have this blue checkmark back because I refuse to pay for Twitter

Do you have a personal (we)blog?

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I wrote my very first piece for The Verge, and I am super excited because it’s about something near and dear to my heart: personal blogging.

I have had a blog or online journal in some form since the late 90s. I started on Geocities, migrated to Blogger, taught myself to configure Greymatter, Movable Type, and WordPress, and I used all the other sites like Typepad, livejournal, tumblr, Vox (before it became the site it is now, it was a blogging platform similar to what tumblr is now)) and everything in between.

The point is, I’m not new to this; I’m true to this.

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Twitter is dying a slow death under Elon Musk

A screenshot of Monique Judge's byline and a headline on an article about Elon Musk and Twitter.
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To be clear, Twitter was already on life support, but Captain Apartheid swooped in and started unplugging all the machinery, and now the site is wheezing for help and pushing the nurse call button, but no one is responding.Ā 

What we lost in the fire: Elon Musk is slowly killing the things that made Twitter a force for good