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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I guess it's kind of funny that after I have been complaining for years about Twitter's bullshit justification for banning Trump under the "incitement to violence" standard, the new management goes and suspends Kanye West because, according to Elon Musk's tweet, "he again violated our rule against incitement to violence." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598543670990495744

Maybe yishan (formerly of Reddit) was right that when you run a social media platform, there are certain bans that you just have to enact to keep your service alive, even though there are no objective rules you can apply to justify these bans.

[EDIT: Just noticed this was already discussed below. Sorry.]

[EDIT 2: I deleted in <10 minutes but there had already been some replies. No good options based on my past choices so I think least-bad is to undelete. Sorry for chaos.]

Weak move by Musk, who said weeks ago he would only censor content/posts, not accounts. And also, posting a swastika , in and itself, is not inciting violence, even if it's interpreted as antisemitic. By that logic, the ADL and SPLC should be banned. No one is more obsessed with Nazi iconography than those groups. I guess he's starting to feel the pinch of advertisers leaving or bad media coverage. 50% of twitter employees laid off and they still kept the worst ones it seems.

OP deleted for some reason, so replying here, on musk, this was a twitter space that Musk joined and spoke in. Rough excerpts (paraphrased, transcripts didn't work)

He's giving taibbi and, "as of an hour ago", bari weiss full access to all twitter documents, uncurated, they can get what they want, he didn't see the tweets before we did. No clue how true all that is

Asked about freedom of expression vs kanye, he claimed, in order - "it was my decision" - "that was incitement to violence ... incitement to violence is illegal in the US ... what is incitement to violence, I think posting a swastika is incitement to violence ... I personally wanted to punch kanye, that is inciting me to violence". It's tough to interpret elon's statements here, what is poorly articulated vs actually true, but if taken literally, that's quite stupid - even saying "i wanna kill all the joos" is protected speech, and posting a funny swastika edit (that's also the logo of a weird cult, raelism) is not incitement to violence in any sense, let alone a legal sense!

He says "at some point it might make sense to make [the twitter files] publicly available". That'd be hilarious, doubt it'll happen.

Elon's hotmicing background noise while other people talk and constantly cutting out, based!