It’s time to say goodbye to Elon Musk’s X. Changes to blocking online harassment will endanger users.

The Nazi troll crew called themselves “The Shed,” and you weren’t supposed to write about them.

To write about them was to attract their attention, and to attract their attention was to experience one of the most vile firehoses of online abuse imaginable. They lived to harass, and they were well-versed in every troll tactic in the book.

Earn their notice, and they’d swarm you. You might see your home address posted, your reputation destroyed through impersonator accounts, or your family held at gunpoint after a “prank” 911 call. It could have been The Shed, or one of the many hornet nests of Nazis who were only too happy to swarm at their prodding. Either way, they’d visit misery on you.

How would they find you to target you? By reading your tweets, of course.

How could you minimize the chances of them reading your tweets? By blocking every Twitter (now X) account associated with them. It’s a necessary defense measure that X’s Elon Musk has decided to neutralize.

As the social media platform’s engineering team announced to users Wednesday, X is planning to deprive its users of another vital tool for combating ever-escalating online stalking and harassment on the platform. Blocking a troll will no longer prevent them from reading your tweets. It’ll suddenly be a lot easier for stalkers, abusers, and harassers to keep tabs on their victims and instantly direct harassment their way.

It’s that instantaneousness that makes this shift so insidiously dangerous. Mass harassment campaigns are like snowballs in the sun. At a slow roll, the snowball melts faster than it can pick up new snow. Allow it to gain momentum, though, and even the afternoon sunshine is no match for that rapid accumulation. The snowball becomes a snow boulder in no time.

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Pre-Musk Twitter was far from perfect, but it did allow harassment victims to create at least some meaningful roadblocks that might slow such a snowball before it gained steam. The block button allowed you to keep a troll account from engaging with you or seeing your content. Third party mass block tools allowed you to block that troll account’s followers, too, making it more difficult for them to collectively flood you with harassment. Moderation wasn’t terrific, but generally you could get the site to ban users who directly threatened your life or your family, or posted explicit Nazi content.

Musk has already dismantled X’s hate speech and harassment moderation system and implemented changes that make mass blocking unworkable. His latest step — allowing abusers and stalkers to freely view their targets’ content even when blocked — takes aim at X’s most basic and necessary anti-harassment feature. Trolls needn’t bother to switch to shadow accounts to stalk anymore; their craft will be that much more efficient. That efficiency translates to speed, and that speed aids the snowball’s growth. The less friction a harasser experiences as they stir up hate, the greater their mass harassment campaign’s odds of success.

[Musk] seems determined to turn the website into an ever more welcoming echo chamber for the worst humanity has to offer.

And let’s be clear: “success” here can mean not only psychological torture but endangering offline terror for the targets. I speak from experience. When I was only a few weeks postpartum in 2021, I answered a sharp knock on our door and found armed police officers outside. Nazis had sent them there with a fake 911 call, hoping a SWAT team would shoot first and ask questions later. I was able to safely convince the cops to leave after a brief conversation; others have not been so lucky.

Since that time, Elon Musk has merrily made X an open haven for Nazis and abusers. There’s not much to be done to pressure him into change; the man has majority ownership and has very publicly leveled profanity-laced taunts at his own advertisers. He seems determined to turn the website into an echo chamber for the worst humanity has to offer, in particular violent misogynists, transphobes, and white supremacists.

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What we can change is the influence of the platform. Though its reach is slowly dwindling, X remains a default home and broadcast system not only for politicians and journalists, but for government agencies, news services, and elected officials. Every day that these people and organizations choose to communicate through X is a day that vulnerable people are forced to choose between their dignity and their access to their news, political representation, and taxpayer-funded services.

It’s time for these leaders to actually lead, clearing a path that leads beyond X and towards social media environments like Bluesky and Mastodon — platforms that at least gesture in the direction of user safety and protection of the vulnerable.

Without that leadership and exodus, marginalized people will find themselves forced to make an impossible choice: to endure harassment, or abandon meaningful access to the communications of the government they fund and the officials sworn to represent them.

There’s no way around it anymore. Twitter is dead, replaced by the cesspool that is Elon Musk’s X.

There’s a path out; it’s time to take it. It’s time to say goodbye.

Gwen Snyder is a writer, researcher, and longtime Philadelphia organizer. She is @gwensnyder.bsky.social on Bluesky.