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So, how's that whole Elon free speech Twitter thing going? Turns out, not great. An article from Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has the details. Basically, back in November, shortly after Elon finished buying Twitter, he noted his belief in free speech was so strong it extended even to leaving up the Twitter account @elonjet. For those who don't know the @elonjet Twitter account used publicly available data to Tweet whenever Elon's private plane flew somewhere. Elon tweeted:
The man behind the account, Jack Sweeney, also operated a bunch of other plane tracker accounts for other billionaires (including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and various Russian oligarchs). As of today it seems the @elonjet Twitter account, along with all the other plane trackers and even Sweeney's personal account, have been suspended. Apparently this suspension is pursuant to a new Twitter rule about sharing personal information:
It took a whole month for Elon to craft a policy to ban the account he specifically said he wouldn't ban due to his commitment to free speech. So much for the idea that the limits of Twitter moderation would be anything like "only illegal speech." It also seems (according to the TechDirt article, and I tried this myself) that you can't even tweet links to @elonjet accounts on other platforms (like Facebook or Instagram). Amusingly Elon's original tweet from November now has a Community Note on it noting what the account that was being mentioned in the tweet was and the fact that it's banned.
Twitter files dump about the internal deliberations on how this policy change and these bans came about when?
ETA:
Seems @elonjet was unsuspended. Apparently the new policy requires "slight" (no word on how long that is) delay before posting info. Although, at the time of this edit the account appears to be suspended again. Link.
ETA2:
Elon now claiming that legal action is being taken against Sweeney. Would love to hear what legal action he's alledgedly taking.
And? The ban was done according to the rule against sharing people's location data, so what more do you want? It's a private company, after all. I hope all the vile antifa doxxing accounts targeting kids get banned and prosecuted too. What else can I say but "purge them, they have no right to free speech on someone else's platform"?
Can you point to an instance of you being upset about a non-leftist account being banned? Why do you care about this one?
What a strange reply. This is obviously about Elon's hypocrisy re: free speech. You going after OP and invoking the "private company" spell, as if OP was using that same excuse pre-Elon-Twitter, is against the spirit/letter of this place.
https://www.themotte.org/post/155/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/25045?context=8#context
He wasn't just using the "private company spell," he spent a week acting shocked that anyone could have a problem with the government censoring people via a partnership with Twitter. I don't think he cares about the object level issue he's talking about, it's just a way of sneering.
I think I was pretty clear in that post and I'll be clear now. Twitter has not violated the First Amendment in either its conduct in 2020/2021 nor by banning the @elonjet account. As @czr notes I am merely amused by the quick demonstration of Elon's own hypocrisy on the topic of free speech.
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