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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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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:

My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk

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:

Under this policy, you can’t share the following types of private information, without the permission of the person who it belongs to:

...

live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available;

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.

I can't be made to care. I just can't. After watching the entire internet break to the yoke of the intelligence services, and living under the rule of man (who hates me), masquerading as the rule of law, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's lies, damned lies, and hypocrisy the whole way down. If the activist that appear to have permanently ruined the internet I loved have to get a taste of their own medicine before Twitter dies permanently, I'm just going to enjoy the show.

You can't appeal to my morals. I no longer have any.