Elon Musk’s Commitment To Only Pretending To Be Committed To Free Speech Still Stands

Elon Musk insisted that a key reason he took over Twitter was in support of free speech." As we noted, it was pretty clear that he never really understood what free speech actually means. Musk likes to say that his focus as the owner of Twitter has been to allow all legal speech, but as we've shown, Musk himself has been shown to have a transparently thin skin, and an unwillingness to take any kind of criticism. So, it was hardly a surprise that, even as he brought back serial fabulists and literal Nazis to the platform, he ramped up efforts to remove his critics - especially those in the media.

While there were reports that he had let those media accounts back on the site, that's not actually the case. Most of the accounts were told that they needed to delete the violating" tweet. CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, who does not believe his account actually violates any rules, pulled a page from Musk's playbook and took a poll on Mastodon to see if he should actually delete the tweet. The results were... pretty conclusive:

Then we have Steve Herman, from Voice of America, who was banned that same night as the purge of other journalists. He appealed" his suspension, but notes on Mastodon that Twitter has rejected his appeal, saying his tweet that merely highlighted that the ElonJet account still existed on Facebook was against the company's policy on posting people's private information without their express authorization or permission." Herman's tweet did exactly none of that. It told people where to go to find a different account that... also did not violate that policy. But, no matter, he's still banned.

If you want to see the specific images he posted, they're below:

Now, again, to be explicitly clear: Elon has every right to do this as the site owner. He can make whatever policies he wants, no matter how nonsensical they are. But at the very least, one would hope that people would begin to recognize that Musk making these arbitrary decisions based (apparently) solely on what makes him feel unsafe, is kind of a weak approximation of the previous regime seeking to moderate based on what would make the largest percentage of users feel safe.

And, it seems like a point you could argue that Twitter's efforts to be as widely welcoming to users as possible did a lot more to support free speech than Elon's efforts to kick journalists off because he had a shit fit and claimed they put his life in danger (which the facts simply do not support).