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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.
It does work. People can speak about being mean to you all they want. It's not until they do something that it becomes a problem, and free speech absolutism has nothing to say about what actions should or shouldn't be allowed.
This is not as hard as people like to think it is. Allow anyone to SAY "We should kill X" and punish whoever attempts to kill X. Speech is protected, easy peasy.
The only "hard part" of this is when people try to characterize actions as speech or vice-versa, and while it's not a completely trivial problem to solve, there are many ways to thread that needle.
There are a lot of different ways to say "we should kill X". Some of them actually make it a whole lot harder to keep X from being killed, and to punish those who kill X. It is entirely possible to use speech to coordinate harm against people in such a way that, once you move from speaking to acting, the people being harmed have no effective recourse.
Free speech absolutism assumes that the above either can't happen, or is too remote a possability to worry about. Both positions are dead wrong, because they ignore the simple reality that humans are social mammals, not robots. Words have consequences, and can change the world in meaningful ways. Everyone who achieves large-scale responsibility is forced, sooner or later, to grapple with this simple, obvious fact. Occasionally, for a little while, times are good enough that some people can allow themselves to forget this simple reality. Sooner or later, though...
No, I'll bite the bullet here. Sometimes, people will coordinate and do something bad and you can't prevent it, only punish afterward. I do not assume it can't happen or is remote. I ACCEPT it as the cost of allowing free speech, and it is a cost worth paying because speech categorically must remain free for society to be worthwhile at all.
Many, perhaps most European countries have significantly less free speech than America has today. Are their societies worthless?
America has had less free speech in practice than it currently enjoys. Was American society worthless when speech was significantly less free? Marginally less free?
There are forms of "speech" that we currently ban, CP for example. Are we worthless now?
Was Britain worthless prior to the revolution?
Free Speech is a spectrum, and the more baroque end of that spectrum imposes costs that scale rapidly. Those costs are easier for a society to bear if it is rich in trust and cohesion. when it's running a cohesion deficit, it simply can't afford them. That doesn't mean speech restrictions are a super awesome best thing ever, it means they're going to happen out of necessity, as decaying societies struggle to keep the peace. This is not a bullet that can be bit. Standing up for free speech in a polarized environment won't actually secure freer speech, but only accelerate the polarization. What will end up happening is that your principles will be implemented unevenly, and thus thoroughly discredited. At the end of the day, you can't actually make fair implementation happen, and unfair implementation is worse. Or do you think that free speech principles are still valuable when they're unevenly applied? If I censor you today and ignore your appeals to free speech, and then tomorrow strike down an attempt to censor me by claiming the same principles I denied to you, is that better than nothing in your estimation?
Free speech is valuable because it helps people live together in peace. If they aren't actually living together in peace, what's the point? The principles you are arguing for have already failed. Expression has gotten drastically less free over the past decade. You and the other Free Speech partisans failed to prevent this, and have failed to correct it. I failed right there with you! The arguments you're making are arguments I grew up on, arguments I believed heart and soul! At some point, though, it's time to admit that what is, is, and attempt to find an accommodation with reality. The theory was beautiful, but it didn't work. We need something better.
The value of free speech is not allowing people to live in peace, it is enabling peaceful change. People may or not make use of that power, or they may otherwise be non-peaceful, but if you cannot advocate for [x], you cannot get x without violently taking it. Society will never be perfect, but it can get better IF (and only if) the people are allowed to ask for what they want.
This is what is valuable. And while not allowing people to say "twindlefrumst" is unlikely to get in the way of things, it sets a precedent that somebody is allowed to decide what you can or cannot say. If this is left unchecked then probability approaches 1 that eventually some other speech will be banned. No mob ever burned just one book. The slope is in fact demonstrably slippery, and every single despotic regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime. It is infinitely preferable to not risk anything like that by making speech restrictions categorically unacceptable, rather than hoping that THIS spot on the slope is firm enough to stand - and ALSO that everybody agrees with you and doesn't try to take one more step down.
We pay the cost of people sometimes misbehaving to guarantee we are still able to change. No other option exists. Either you bite the bullet of "bad speech" happening, or you risk the very concept of peaceful societal change - arguably humanity's second or third greatest achievement.
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