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’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.
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.
Musk bought Twitter with the stated purpose of allowing free speech. If Musk bans some accounts while bringing back others, he's being a giant hypocrite by not allowing all to speak freely.
We've already seen him banning accounts of people who were saying things he didn't agree with so I really don't think we can say he defends freedom of speech. What Musk seems to want to do is make money off of attracting and offering to signal boost what would be otherwise unpopular speech.
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.
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".
Musk supports speech that Musk likes; that isn't freedom. For example, Musk is against speech that criticizes Twitter or Elon; some are intimidated and harassed (e.g., called pedophiles), and some are silenced (or 'canceled') including journalists and others.
He owns Twitter, he probably has the right to do it as a private platforn owner, and it is still worth calling him out for doing it. Freedom of speech he is exercising is not freedom of criticism of speech.
Its especially worthwhile because Musk sold himself as an absolutist of a view of free speech in which platforms like Twitter were not exercisers of free speech but actors whose decision to shape and bias content violated their users rights to free speech.
But Musk doesn't want a platform for "free speech" - he wants a platform where guys like him can do or say what they like without repercussions, but where he can crack down on anyone he doesn't like.
Like it or not Twitter is about as good a compromise as you're going to get. The "free speech" places like Truth Social and Gab will happily boot you off if they don't like you. Twitter have a TOS where they are very forgiving - for the most part issuing suspensions for violations and allowing you to delete TOS-breaking tweets rather than banning you. The line for Twitter seems to be when there is actual real-world harm that can be directly attributed to your actions on the platform. So if you're getting banned from Twitter you need to have fucked up big time
It takes a huge leap of logic to come to the conclusion that Musk cares about free speech for anyone other than himself. What he wants is speech without consequences for himself. His ability to speak is mostly unrestricted by any government power, and policy changes at Twitter will have no effect on what few restrictions he might encounter.
It's easy to project your hopes and dreams onto a person when you discount the meaning of their literal words and replace them with your own biases. I have no illusions that Musk's own conception of "free speech" is not just as qualified and diminished as what Twitter offers. If Musk had a legitimately impressive adherence to the principles of free speech, backed by deed, that would be one thing. If he could put his money where his mouth is in literally any other context, that would be a data point. But Musk's record on free speech is the opposite; he often uses the legal system as well as his own wealth to exert pressure which is anti-free speech. To be clear I'm not saying he is wrong to do this, but he's wrong on the basis of free speech. Indeed, Musk is very keen to restrict the speech of others when he feels that speech harms him. That's reasonable, but not principled.
Taken as a whole, to me this just indicates that Musk is not a free speech absolutist but instead a fair-weather supporter of free speech; he's for free speech when it works for him, but also anti-free speech when it works for him. This makes him no better or worse than anyone else IMO, but it certainly doesn't make him the standard bearer of free speech.
However, the thing that does make him worse than everyone else is that he lies about it. He calls himself a free speech absolutist knowing full well the meaning of those words. He's trying to paint himself as a champion when in fact he's not, which makes him either delusional or a manipulative liar. Either way, he shouldn't be the one at the helm of Twitter, if the rationale is that it would be a boom for free speech. It would just be more of the same. Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.
Well, in the context of Musk's entire public premise for buying Twitter being to provide an at-scale safe haven for online free speech, it absolutely is a free speech issue.
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.
Has Musk made it clear why he thinks Twitter doesn’t serve the goal of free speech with explicit reasons? I don’t follow him so he may have mentioned them in the past.
Musk is very pro-free-speech-even-speech-that-offends.
Twitter is very ban-anything-that-doesn’t-comport-with-our-woke-worldview-and-call-it-hate-speech-or-disinformation. Also they selectively apply TOS against people they don’t like while regularly ignoring blatant TOS violations from people they like.
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