How to Keep Prying Eyes Off Your Posts When X Changes Its Block Policy

X, formerly known as Twitter, said it will soon change the way blocking on the platform works. 

Right now, blocking someone on X prevents them from contacting you, following you and seeing your posts. (It also unfollows them if you were.)

The change will allow anyone to view your posts, regardless of whether you've blocked them or not. A blocked user still won't be able to interact with you in any way. 

The block changes, which were announced by the X Engineering account, have brought up safety concerns, especially in regards to privacy and targeted harassment. If you want to keep blocked users from viewing your posts, we have two methods, neither great but one is easy and the other extreme. We'll explain.  

For more, read about how Bluesky hit a top five spot in US app store after X's block policy change and why decentralizing social media is the future. 

You have two options to keep X users from seeing your posts, and neither is great

If you're looking to get ahead of the upcoming policy change, you have two options, and neither of them is ideal. The first option is to leave X altogether by deactivating your account and waiting 30 days for it to be deleted. 

Keep in mind that if you want to scrub all of your posts from the internet, it's going to be hard, thanks to internet archive sites like the Wayback Machine. You'll need to submit requests to have your posts removed from it if you find them on the site, and the request may be denied. 

Protect your X posts

The second option is less rash, but will limit your reach and how you interact with others on the platform. Protecting your posts will prevent not only blocked users from viewing your posts, but anyone who's not following your account. Moreover, when you protect your posts, you have to manually approve each person that has requested to follow your account. And given all of the spam bots on the platform, it may provide a sense of relief. More reasons to protect your posts:

• They won't be indexed by search engines like Google
• They will only be searchable by you and your followers 

One (maybe not-so) obvious downside is that your replies to posts will only show up to people who are following you. So while you can reply to an account's posts that isn't following you, they won't see it.

How to protect your posts on X

From the web:

1. Login to your X account
2. Click the More option
3. Select Settings and privacy 
4. Click Privacy and safety
5. Click Audience, media, and tagging
6. Click the checkbox next to Protect your posts.

From your phone (iOS and Android):

1. Tap your profile icon
2. Tap Settings and Support
3. Tap Settings and privacy
4. Tap Privacy and safety
5. Tap Audience and tagging
6. Tap to toggle Protect your posts on

That's it! Once the new blocking policy is put into place, accounts you've blocked won't be able to see any of your posts. 

For more, check out how to delete all of your embarrassing Twitter posts.