But at least I can hold them responsible for violating their own stated values. The former Twitter leadership just hid content that didn't fit theirs or third parties sensitivities and told me they are doing me a favor.
Restricting speech is always in the interests of those that have the power to shape discussions, so limiting speech is always counter productive.
Those two are enormously different, though. I'd consider myself an advocate, just as anyone who believes in a fair and free democracy should. But I am very far from being an absolutist — and I have a secret suspicion that nobody actually is. Musk certainly isn't.
Next is misinformation and tomorrow you wonder why you cannot state your opinion anymore. A cycle that has been repeated ad nauseum. It just isn't a smart solution and causes more problems than it solves.
Maybe the biggest challenge is defining what constitutes "spam." While some cases seem clear-cut (e.g., repeated identical messages from bots, malware, phishing), others are quite subjective. Subtle marketing? Aggressive marketing? Repetitive but sincere advocacy for a cause? Repetitive but insincere trolling? Repetitive but sincere trolling?
All this seems rather obvious, so I was kind of surprised to see how many people bought into Elon's vision for Twitter, it was never workable.
That said, I agree the government probably shouldn't be involved here for the most part (slippery slope, government is a blunt tool, etc.). As long as your "speech" isn't actually harming someone (harassment, revenge porn, incitement, etc.)
As long as we're defending scoundrels it's worth remembering we already lack so many protections for non-scoundrels. In a lot of states you can be fired if your boss hears a whiff of collective bargaining. But I digress.
This is not true. Restricting hate speech is an obvious counterexample.
That there are limited worker protections in countries is a different problem, but is certainly not inhibited by too much speech, quite the contrary it would worsen the situation further. Civil liberties never suffered because too much speech was allowed, so the perspective to err on the side of freedom is only logical.
> there is simply no debate to be had about the basic humanity of certain classes of people
That is just an invalid generalization.
It is a bad idea and damaging and there is ample empirical evidence for that.
The former Twitter leadership was very clear about what sort of content would be his. And is was based entirely on the type of content ahead of time. Critiquing this sort of content policy is like saying that newspapers should not be allowed to have clear standard for what is publishable in classified ads.
All claims of "I'm being oppressed" by Twitter policies have been absolutely ridiculous, and discrediting to supposed free speech advocate/absolutist positions.
Similarly discrediting is the silence on Musk's attacks on the free web and attempts at censorship of specific disprefeerred news outlets.
We all see what gets fought ago and what is not faught against, and the answer is clears the right to attack and intimidate groups with threatening behavior is defending, but actual censorship of reasonable discourse is tolerated.
It probably goes without saying that this would be an extremely unpleasant place, but there would be nowhere else to go once the last platform won.
What we have today is a number of smaller social networks, each with a different strategy to shape the conversation. It may very well be true that the creators of a platform choose editorial methods and goals that resonate with them personally, but what’s important to the dynamic of the platforms and free speech is that until we are all on that one terrible platform, that methods used to moderate your speech are nothing more than a company’s efforts to differentiate their product from others.
Restricting speech is in the interest of product differentiation. This, of course, is in the interest of the owner of the product, but it is always also in the interest of the consumer who wants a rich speech market to choose from, and who loathes the idea of a global 4chan style megasite to the exclusion of all other social media. This is why failure to limit speech in the context of a coherent speech product is always counterproductive.