My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15894149585086914...
https://twitter.com/artywah/status/1603592195046400000
(I don’t have a direct link to that tweet, but I’m confident that screenshot tweet isn’t faked.)
Edit: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657
@elonjet can be found on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@elonjet
Incredibly, links to Mastodon instances are now flagged as a safety risk on Twitter.
Video of the Twitter spaces meeting, until this link gets removed: https://twitter.com/ForeverEversley/status/16036127708929187...
I assume he got emotional because his child was involved, then did this in a fit of rage, and is now unable to admit that he was wrong. There is no way you can look at this and say what he did was right, no matter what political stance you have.
A newly created rule, the violation of which isn't clear either.
I suppose this is unavoidable if you give one person complete control over a platform. Perhaps it should be illegal for big social media platforms to have a shareholder with over 50% of the voting power.
But it isn't obvious that this decision is bad. What is quite clear he has changed his mind on pure free speech - which, realistically, was widely predicted. This isn't a political exercise though, he's just booting a few journalists in a hasty, poorly planned but ultimately not unreasonable policy. There is no ideology that requires a geo-fix on Elon's jet.
Although I'll postfix that all with "yet". People were claiming Alex Jones was the end of it relatively recently, and that story ended with the US president being booted off for partisan reasons.
Care to substantiate this?
The reason Trump was booted was his role in supporting and promoting Jan. 6th. The whole thing started as a rally put on by Trump.
Then the so-called "Twitter Files" [1] provide confirmation of what we already sort-of knew that the inside of Twitter was a highly partisan environment creating internal pressures to boot Trump for political reasons, looking for excuses and testing attempts blindly. Note that the process outlined to ban him was to keep testing tweets, the policy team returned "no violation", then they tried the next tweet. Then eventually the executive got impatient and seem to have overruled the process to get him kicked off.
Compared to that, what Musk is doing is rather mundane and palatable. It is more or less up front that he doesn't like the journalists targeting his affairs, and isn't politically motivated or likely to be meaningful.
It has been a couple of years now, there was a big investigation that turned up nothing. Trump is running for president again the usual way and just launched an NFT token so it is pretty clear he wasn't seriously plotting a revolution. Their interpretation of Jan 6 was wrong, partisan and material.
[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1602364197194432515?cxt...