Elon Musk has unblocked everyone from Twitter and wants you to do the same, says negative feedback is good

By Divyanshi SharmaIf you were blocked by Elon Musk on Twitter, there’s some ‘good news’ for you. The billionaire decided to unblock everyone from his Twitter handle and has encouraged to others to follow suit as ‘negative feedback is a good thing’. Meanwhile, in another tweet, Musk replied to a user and agreed that the accounts that had been blocked by several users were earlier shadowbanned on Twitter. However, the algorithm has now been fixed.

Elon Musk unblocks everyone from Twitter

In a tweet, Musk wrote, “I have unblocked everyone I blocked, apart from scammers. I recommend others do the same. Negative feedback is a good thing.”

Elon Musk on accounts being shadowbanned

For the uninitiated, shadowbanning means users’ content being invisible to their followers, without the user getting a notification about the practice.

A user recently pointed out that Twitter accounts that were blocked or muted by the masses had lower visibility. Replying to the tweet, Musk pointed out that the ‘idiotic algorithm’ had now been fixed. He wrote, “This idiotic algorithm change has been reverted. It also caused my account engagement to drop by a factor of ten, because it was based on absolute number of blocks, not blocks as a percentage of followers. This meant any large account that posted anything “controversial” was sent to the 9th level of hell.”

Recent layoffs at Twitter

Elon Musk had recently announced more layoffs at Twitter, after promising no more layoffs in November last year. The layoffs majorly impacted people from sales and engineering departments reportedly.

As per a report in The Verge, employees across sales and engineering departments were laid off by the company a couple of days back. One of the laid-off employees was reporting directly to Musk and was managing the engineering for Twitter’s ads business. This was the third round of layoffs since Musk’s promise of no more firings at the company.

The report also adds that Musk had asked employees to improve the way Twitter ads work and had given them one week’s deadline to do so. However, the reason behind the layoffs remain unclear.

Earlier, Elon Musk had apologised to people on Twitter for the platform’s ‘irrelevant and annoying ads’. The billionaire further added that the company is taking the necessary steps and will be tying ads to keywords and topics in tweets, similar to how Google search works.

He wrote, “Sorry for showing you so many irrelevant & annoying ads on Twitter! We’re taking the (obvious) corrective action of tying ads to keywords and topics in tweets, like Google does with search. This will improve contextual relevance dramatically.”