Posting a swastika alone is not necessarilly a call to violence like posting a confederate flag or ACAB isn't always a call to violence.
It's been more than evident that the drivers Musk's policies on moderation are commercial and personal which is well within his right.
Others are pointing out the hypocrisy of him claiming that his motivations for setting policy have been a dedication to 'free speech absolutism' which is clearly not the case.
If yourself and others the moderation policy on Twitter was too oppressive to right wing views and are happy with this new direction all I can say is good for you. But you and those same other people should come out and expressly say that instead of getting on a high horse over "free speech absolutism" when thats clearly not what you're interested in.
> Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet
Very funny to see people twist themselves into a pretzel to explain why this ban is justified despite all of Elon's phony preening about "free speech" over the past few months. Elon paid good money to live out his twitter admin power fantasy and it's as simple as that. Free speech is a brand not a real principle that Elon cares about. The most ironic part is that Swastikas are still allowed on twitter, but personal attacks against Musk are a big no-no.
Well, when previous Twitter management did things like this, Musk said that they were restricting free speech. So this is at least anti "Musk's definition of free speech".
Your arguments are invalid because Musk himself bashed Twitter for similar behavior before he bought it, and all hell would have broken loose if they had banned him for it.
He proclaimed himself to be free speech absolutist and now fails miserably on multiple occasions.
It only shows that it is not about freedom of speech, but about being able to say whatever he wants.
That's not freedom, it's tyranny. Fear him if your tweets don't get his favor.
And it was Musk who claims free speech as highest value and now he bans words he doesn't like and bans people who criticize him or one of his companies.
So if he purports that Twitter now limits freedom of speech, the only thing he can mean by that is hate speech, dangerous medical misinformation, conspiracy bs, or calls to violence.
I've always had a gut feeling that Musk is politically on the far right spectrum farther than most people would believe, but now that he has joined the ranks of these misguided new right-wing "muh freedom of speech"-warriors, who never had any point to begin with, it's a strong indicator rather than just a feeling.
Musk overtly uses his companies to retaliate against people who criticize him; he's not at all radically free speech in the sense of believing the owner of a company should not fully utilize the company to promote views that serve their interests and suppress others.
Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech. For a while he banned any mention of Mastodon, or the ElonJet account, and he's banned a whole slew of antifascist accounts and journalists who report on the far right (he will claim that it's because they violated rules, but in each case it seems it was a new rule: journalism he doesn't like is "doxxing": reporting on who did what). So sure, it looks like he is willing to lose a big chunk of his net worth to change Twitter, but his intent seems to be to promote certain speech and suppress other speech, or as he would say, to kill the "woke mind virus".
Musk literally called himself a free speech absolutist and I can point to any number of HN commentators on threads involving Twitter, free speech etc that said the same thing.
Pre-Musk Twitter didn't specifically try to present itself as a bastion of free speech.
On top of that, in case of this particular account, Musk specifically said that it would be allowed on the platform per his understanding of free speech.
It's not reasonable for someone claiming free speech absolutism & unbiased moderation. You do make a good point by pointing out Musk could have just built his own social media platform instead of crying about the moderation and blowing $44B on Twitter, only to fail to make good on his promise of free speech.
Musk’s involvement in Twitter has absolutely nothing to do with free speech. Like many things he does, it’s a false narrative to push what he wants forwards. He has a clear history of trying to bully and shutdown those that disagree with him in any capacity.
Do you actually know the person in question or did you just kneejerk response assuming that they're complaining about free speech?
The point isn't Musk's right to ban whoever he wants. It's the hypocrisy he demonstrated, and the people that got suckered into his false promise of complete freedom of speech. I can point to threads from just a few weeks ago where people were cheering because Twitter under Musk would finally be free*.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864
Evidentally that doesn't work on celebrities.
Posting a swastika alone is not necessarilly a call to violence like posting a confederate flag or ACAB isn't always a call to violence.
It's been more than evident that the drivers Musk's policies on moderation are commercial and personal which is well within his right.
Others are pointing out the hypocrisy of him claiming that his motivations for setting policy have been a dedication to 'free speech absolutism' which is clearly not the case.
If yourself and others the moderation policy on Twitter was too oppressive to right wing views and are happy with this new direction all I can say is good for you. But you and those same other people should come out and expressly say that instead of getting on a high horse over "free speech absolutism" when thats clearly not what you're interested in.
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