from the Free speech relativist Dept

The inevitable has happened and Elon has begun banning and suppressing the speech of people who “were on his team,” causing many to suddenly realize that he might not be such a big proponent of free speech after all was.

Look, we’ve spent the better part of the last three years pointing out that Elon Musk doesn’t understand free speech and has often directly violated the basic principles of free speech. He has filed numerous lawsuits aimed at suppressing speech. And even if you want to claim that he somehow pursued a “freer expression” approach in running ExTwitter than his predecessors, you’re still wrong.

He has routinely banned journalists who anger him or shut down reporting that questions his political allies. He has repeatedly throttled links to sites he deems competitive and recently admitted to suppressing posts with links to news sources.

And of course, Musk has shown that he is a pushover for authoritarian demands when it comes to free speech, resisting government attempts at repression as long as he supports the government in question. Although he has occasionally resisted when he disagreed ideologically with the government, these seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Even Elon’s own ExTwitter transparency report admits that account suspensions have tripled under his watch compared to before Musk.

There is no measure by which one can say that Elon is a greater supporter of free speech than Twitter’s previous management, except in the very, very narrow category of “allowing bigoted Elon Musk fans to be vocally disruptive on the platform.” “.

And now even that is coming back to bite him a little.

Last week, some MAGA people called out Elon for his support for H1B visas and other attempts to bring high-skilled tech workers to the US. Given that many of MAGA’s supporters have spent much of the last two years falsely claiming that Elon would “bring back free speech,” it’s been almost amusing to watch them slowly realize that he’s ready , suspend them or strip them of their premium features if he gets angry with them.

The most prominent account was Laura Loomer, whose greatest notoriety appears to be the fact that she was able to be banned from platforms.

Musk then used his favorite trick to justify that account suppression was not an attack on free speech by redefining spam to mean something that had nothing to do with spam at all.

Musk’s statement raises more questions than it answers. Here Elon again tries to justify the suppression of certain accounts. First, he claims that the algorithm is tuned to “maximize unrepentant user seconds,” a made-up, impossible-to-calculate statistic that he’s been talking about for some time. He then claims that the algorithm does this by ranking certain accounts based on how often other paying accounts mute or block them. But then he adds a caveat: If he detects a brigading campaign of accounts designed to mute/block other accounts in order to suppress their reach, ExTwitter can magically filter out the real mutes/blocks from the fake brigades and some accounts declare it to be “spam”.

This is all a load of nonsense for Elon when he is able to suppress any speech he wants and try to justify it as spam (just like he has done in the past by “doxxing” redefined). Of course, as with Elon’s ever-changing definition, I imagine his legion of fans will continue to doxxing to justify his own actions and will continue to subscribe to his nonsensical definition of spam.

Well, except for the MAGA faithful, who are now angry that their faces are being eaten by the Leopards Eating Faces Party they supported.

In other words, Musk reserves the right to unilaterally decide which blocks and mutes are “legitimate” and which are not, based on criteria known only to him. This arbitrary and opaque process is far from a principled commitment to freedom of expression.

(Also, I won’t even go into why his tweet misunderstands the whole “live by the sword/die by the sword” line, but leave that as an exercise for readers.)

The end result of this, however, was Musk begging people on his website to stop being such assholes that he had specifically taken on the job of unbanning people for being assholes.

I mean, it’s not like we didn’t warn Elon exactly how this was going to turn out. And it’s not like we haven’t written about how content moderation teams aren’t about ideology. They just wish everyone would stop being idiots, which is key to any website that allows user-generated content.

I know I keep beating the drum on this, but that’s because there are still a lot of people who falsely insist that Elon Musk has a principled stance on free speech, even though this has been made clear time and time again and again and again that his opinions are based solely on his own whims about what he wants, rather than on any truly understandable notion of free speech.

No matter how many times Musk is caught red-handed suppressing speech he doesn’t like, a vocal group will likely continue to subscribe to the myth that he is a “free speech absolutist.” But for anyone willing to look objectively at their actions rather than their words, the reality is undeniable. Elon Musk’s “free speech” stance is nothing more than a flimsy rhetorical cover for his own desire to control the discourse.

Yes, he has every right to do this on his own platform, but so did the people running Twitter before him. Musk may draw the boundaries of content moderation a little differently than the previous team, but he certainly seems to draw them much more arbitrarily based on his personal whims.

Filed under: Content Moderation, Doxxing, Elon Musk, Free Speech, H1-B Visas, Immigration, Laura Loomer, Maga, Spam

Company: Twitter, x