It'll be interesting to see if the people who've been lauding musk for his supposedly pro free speech attitudes will reckon with what's been happening in actuality, or if they'll just accept this as "freedom for me but not for thee".
When a cult leader fails to deliver, or otherwise issues a prediction that never materializes, the cult member usually grow stronger in the cult’s convictions. This is kind of a counterintuitive psychological phenomena but it has been demonstrated quite a few times. There may be something of a cognitive dissonance driving this. It is that after you see your cult leader fail, you can either dismiss all your prior believes, or change your version of reality to match the cult’s altered dogma. It seems as if doing the latter is easier for most people, so this is in turn what most people do.
Residents of the commune later committed suicide by drinking a flavored beverage laced with potassium cyanide; some were forced to drink it, some (such as small children) drank it unknowingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid
I have a longstanding interest in social psychology and the way a cult generally arranges to control people is to cut them off financially, socially, etc. This is the same way that abusive husbands typically treat their abused wives. One study sought to identify character traits that made abused women more likely to kill their abusive husband and could not do so. Instead, they found that the women who murdered their abusive husbands were the most isolated, the most abused, the most painted into a corner. In short, they were women who found themselves with no other way out.
I suppose if you work for the man or are enthralled by his billions or some such, that's going to hold sway for some people. But I have trouble comparing his Twitter debacle to what cults do.
Anyway, just rambling on. Not actually interested in discussing this Twitter mess that I am mostly trying to avoid discussing in spite of the entire world seeming to discuss nothing else.
But if you have some citations to back up your social psychology related statement, I would be interested in seeing those as it's an area of interest of mine.