The Tech Company Brief by Hackernoon: With Recent Update, ‘X’ Faces Confrontation with App Store and Google Play

Ah, the wonderful world of Elon Musk.

The world’s richest man has a habit of surprising the world at large with new experiments and changes to his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, and the latest might be the most brazen yet.

Just this past week, Musk announced out of the blue that X would be removing users’ ability to block accounts. Blocking someone is a rather basic, if not fundamental, right of internet users and it’s not entirely clear what exactly Musk would be achieving by removing that “feature” (emphasis Musk’s, not ours), yet, here we are.

Elon Musk Tweets About Removing the Block Feature from “X”, Formerly Known as Twitter

Now, before we get into the optics of removing the ability to block users, news reports have pointed out that this change will bring X into conflict with guidelines incorporated by Apple’s App Store and Alphabet’s Google Play.

According to Reuters, both Apple and Google require apps with user-generated content (such as X) to give its users the ability to block other users. This is done to prevent someone from being harassed online or from being subjected to cyberbullying, which is all too prevalent on the internet.

So far, it’s not clear whether either of those app stores will remove X, though the chances of it being delisted are very unlikely.

X users will still have the ability to block someone from DM’ing them and will also have the ability to “mute” someone which screens a user from seeing specified accounts but, unlike blocking, does not alert the other account to the action.

Twitter ranked #13 on HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankingsthis week.

Twitter Ranking on HackerNoon’s Tech Company News Page

AI Reviews, Now Coming to an Amazon Near You

Well, it happened.

It looks like Amazon is rolling out generative AI capabilities across customer reviews to help buyers make purchase decisions.

The way it’s going to work is that you could ask AI to generate a short summary of the user reviews for a product you’re interested in; this is being done to presumably optimize a buyer’s experience by taking away the need togo through individual reviews (which they still can after reading the summary!) and instead, get all the information they need in a single go.

The capability is going to roll out to a subset of mobile shoppers in the U.S. across a broad selection of products, Amazon said in a statement.

Amazon ranked #1 on HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankingsthis week.

Amazon Ranking on HackerNoon’s Tech Company News Page

In Other News..

Adobe co-founder Dr. John Warnock has died — he was 82 — via The Verge.

From Mad Men to machines? Big advertisers shift to AI — via Reuters.

Microsoft Plans AI Service With Databricks That Could Hurt OpenAI — via The Information.

Tesla says data breach impacting 75,000 employees was an insider job — via TechCrunch.

‘It gave us some way to fight back’: New tools aim to protect art and images from AI’s grasp — via CNN.

Companies struggle to deploy AI due to high costs and confusion — via Axios.

The iPhone 15 could get one of the biggest upgrades in years: A new charging port — via CNBC.

And that’s a wrap! Don’t forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y’all next week. PEACE!

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon

All rankings are current as of Monday and may change by the time of publication. To view the latest ranking, visit HackerNoon’s Tech Company News Pages.

This article was originally published by Sheharyar Khan on Hackernoon.