Musk's statement was that free speech would be allowed on Twitter. And yet, here he is chilling free speech. It's not surprising. It's just also really bad. So people are up in arms that they're losing a platform that, while by no means perfect, was better for free speech than it currently is.
First they aren’t “seething”, they’re not even that surprised, they’re just pointing out that the loopy billionaire was insincere the entire time.
It’s simply news when a famous person does the exact opposite of what they’ve been loudly pretending to champion for years. Man bites dog.
No. It is 100% A-OK for Ol' Muskie to ban who he wants for whatever spurious reasons he wants to post-hoc claim. It's his company, he can do that. 100%.
What people are correctly pointing out is that he rode in on his "FREE SPEECH IS GOOD" horse waving a "BOTS ARE BAD" banner, loudly proclaiming that "Only illegal speech will be banned", re-enabled a whole bunch of accounts for bigots based on bot-ridden unreliable polls, swerved hard to the alt-right lane, picked up a transphobic smoothie and blew both his feet off with a +100 Shotgun Of Hypocrisy by starting to ban people who mock, track, or report on him.
Then Elon turns around does the same thing and suddenly they flip and claim they were always "free speech proponents" all along.
They should just be honest and admit it's all political.
But anyways, this NH post is now at 1320 comments. It's like CNN's talking heads shouting at each other.
The release of the previous management's internal communications showed the liberal and comfortable application of euphemism, justification after the fact, and technical deniability in upper leadership.
Twitter showing outage not over evidence that the culture of banning and de-amplifying both users and public interest topics without agency or notification, condemning by decision of a secret, unauditable council under influence of the federal government and corporations, and doing so under the tack of keeping their CEO in the dark shows how carefully calculated their appearance was. Remember, they lost their canary.
I don't think Elon Musk is much if any better. I also can't say that Twitter is any worse. Speech was being chilled and controlled before, and unless your definition of "free speech" is "being free from what offends me or is counter to my opinions and beliefs", it's more likely the hypocrisy you worry about is nothing more than actually being able to draw a line between an action and its cause and a target you can confidently level a finger at.
People will adjust as they ever have. However, the ones who interact now will be the influencers of what Twitter becomes. That is what matters, not any confused and petty logic that our leaders should all be infallible and godlike.
It's abundantly clear from his actions and inactions what is important to him, we have millennia of written history on these cases. At this point people are willfully ignoring it.
90% of comment when Twitter was censoring before Musk were in support of it.
Now 90% of comments in this thread are against it.
You know HN has hundreds of thousands of users, right?
We all know why these rules are being made, that Elon musk's feelings were hurt and he's lashing out, but Twitter is pretending that it's for some consistent rule. Transparency would be for twitter to say straight up that it's against the rules to say things Elon doesn't like
People are making fun of him because of that, and really dont care about about the censorships or bans