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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?
I'm not sure there's anything I "want" as such. I'm just amused by Elon's quick 180 on his own free speech commitments.
I'm not sure I could point to an instance of my being outraged at a leftist account being banned, tbh. I care about this one because of its plain demonstration of Elon's lie about being committed to freedom of speech on Twitter.
Then I guess my answer to your question is "pretty well actually," because he actually seems to be learning that free speech absolutism can't be extended to groups that want to abolish free speech and destroy him. "So much for the tolerant right" is as lame an argument as when conservatives tried to use it to universal jeering and gloating.
I expected he'd eventually learn once he was in the driver's seat, but maybe he'll actually pick it up fast enough to avoid any stupid mistakes like providing the attackers a platform.
So he's... learning that he doesn't want to be a free speech absolutist? Because as I see it (as something close to a free speech absolutist), free speech can be extended to groups that want to abolish free speech and destroy me just fine. Free speech can't be abolished, and I can't be destroyed, by ways of speech alone. What you are saying, on the other hand, seems to be pretty close to the "speech is literally violence" view that I otherwise hear from progressives, despite you being seemingly anti-progressive (insofar as you wantonly suspecting OP of discriminating against non-leftists seemingly solely on the basis of getting leftist vibes from an anti-Musk account is an indication).
Don't be a free speech absolutist. The concept doesn't work.
Speech is the best coordination mechanism there is. When people start using it to coordinate meanness against people like yourself, that is in fact an existential threat to you. If they decide to oppress you, your free speech absolutism will not restrain them, nor will their rejection of it summon magical karma justice from the ether. There are principles worth dying for. The right to try to use speech to generate evil without restraint is not one of them.
Naturally, I applaud your principles to the exact extent that they seem instrumentally useful to me. This is because I'm a human. Still, your principles should probably account in some way for the evident nature of humans.
The whole concept of Free speech Absolutism is based on the idea that a specific set of rules can be codified that will flawlessly constrain human behavior, that can't be worked around or ignored, that have no loopholes. The idea that human frailty and malice can be solved by sufficiently-elegant rule design constantly runs afoul of observable reality, and yet people stubbornly cling to it. They should stop, before they get more people hurt. To the extent that rules work at all, it's when people are actually motivated to cooperate in keeping them. Absent that cooperation, no rules will ever be sufficient to fix what's broken in mankind.
That seems like a very general argument against a lot of principles. "Don't be for the rule of law. (...) Law is the strongest mechanism for collective violence in our society. When people start using it to instigate lawsuits against people like yourself, that is in fact an existential threat to you. If they decide to jail you, your rule-of-law absolutism will not restrain them. (...) There are principles worth dying for. The right to try to use the law to sanction people without restraint is not one of them." Basically every societal policy benefits some and harms some, and, yes, those who it comes to harm tend to regret previously having supported it.
...and, you know, now that I think about it, I don't see that as a problem. Lots of people out there are enthusiastic proponents of punishing criminals and sending people to jail based on the decisions of a jury of their peers, but will curse the jury, the state and the entire legal system if they are deemed to have committed some crime and they are the ones sentenced to prison - especially if they believe themselves to be innocent. Were they wrong to have been for legal punishment before it was levelled against them? Would you hold it against them that they flipped opinion once they pulled the short end of the stick? Should an argument like "you know as well as I do that the legal system sometimes punishes innocent people, and if that were to happen to you, you would rage against it; so it is hypocritical of you to be a proponent of it now" persuade the pro-law-and-order individual to change their stance?
It is. "The Torah is not a suicide pact" is one example of the same argument. As with most such general arguments, the problem is that an escape hatch designed to avoid the very worst of consequences quickly swallows all the principles it applies to. For instance, not allowing people to plan murders on the platform quickly leads to the most milquetoast of things as being tantamount to planning a murder and thus prohibited (this was the fig leaf for the Trump ban, after all). The only way around that is basically good faith, people with as much dedication to the law as the rabbinate who can actually be trusted to keep such general exceptions in check. But good faith actors are thin on the ground; good faith actors with authority even less so, and no procedural safeguards can constrain the bad-faith ones.
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