zlacker

Sorry, can you back this up with some data and specificity?

I understand that you feel Musk is aligned with the far right; my question is what exactly is Musk doing with twitter, and (other than when people take the piss against him personally) how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"?

I'm genuinely interested in the details -- and they are hard to come by.

>>vessen+(OP)
> you feel Musk is aligned with the far right

It's not a feel, it's real (unless you're so far to the right yourself, you don't consider the AfD, neo-nazis, TERFs, etc etc such)

>>vessen+(OP)
Elevating tweets of folks that pay the troll under the bridge, where folks on the left are going to avoid that fee (why would someone on the left materially support a right wing pundit?) is one very obvious way.

>>vessen+(OP)
He tweeted 150x a day in support of Trump leading up to the election. Just go look at his timeline.

Edit: lol at this getting downvoted. Some of you free speech purists really don't want to hear basic facts. Seriously. Just go look at the timeline. 150x a day is not an exaggeration. All of it in direct support of Trump, or attacking DEI and anything else associated with Democrats.

>>vessen+(OP)
I use Twitter for machine learning research only, but somehow that account gets inundated with Maga crap. That's proof enough for me.

Sure, that's an anecdote of one instance, but it's so clear. And how would you do a proper study? I'm guessing you would need Elon's permission.

>>vessen+(OP)
Create a new account and find out. If you create a new account, without any other information, twitter will recommend you follow Musk, Don Jr (President's right wing son), and Babylong Bee, a right wing fake news joke site.

Go ahead, do the experiment and come back and tell me what you see.

>>vessen+(OP)
Elon suspended PG's account just for lightly alluding that another social media platform exists. I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the idea of free speech on Twitter. Can you imagine Discord suspending your account for lightly alluding that Slack exists?

>>vessen+(OP)
I can. Before he owned twitter, if someone called me the n-word or other racial slurs, action was taken. Now when that happens and I report it, they reply to tell me no rules were broken

>>vessen+(OP)
If your position is that awareness of Musk’s alignment with the far right is a matter of feeling rather than well-documented fact [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] then no amount of easily-accessible and readily-available detail will convince you to adjust that position.

As for an example of Elon making Twitter rules around speech he doesn’t like, here[8] is one that is very public and not hard to come by.

1 https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/02/elon-musk-nazis-kanye-twit...

2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/12/20/elo...

3 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/elon-musk-far-...

4 https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...

5 https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/business/elon-musk-nazi-jokes...

6 https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/05/02/elon-musk-reinstates-...

7 https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-twitter-nazis-whit...

8 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-cis-cisgender-slur-twitter-185...

>>vessen+(OP)
This is by Twitter itself, before Musk: "Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left." https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119

This is more recent: "We observe a right-leaning bias in exposure for new accounts within their default timelines." https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01852

You can also find a lot a testimony from users like: https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1es2lfd/...

---

Now from personal experience (I've been on Twitter since 2007 and used it virtually everyday since then):

I've heard and read a lot of such testimony in particular from user who don't post much or at all and only follow a few accounts. In the last two years they've been exposed to a lot of far right content.

I've seen how the moderation team at twitter took action before musk when reporting (often illegal) hate speech and now just respond by saying that it doesn't violates the platform rules.

I've seen on the contrary people (even journalists) and political or news organization getting locked out of their account following a far right online mob against them, and then having a hard time (sometimes to the point of giving up) getting it back because the moderation team did not act.

>>mempko+s3
You don't even need a new account. You could have a years old account and you'll get notifications about that crap even if you have never followed anything even remotely similar. That's what made me delete my account. I got Musk's tweets in my notifications and noped the fuck out.

>>vessen+(OP)
Just go check out that man's X (twitter?) feed. Elon constantly says the quiet part out loud. I'm from genx and if you're younger I'm going to give you all some solid life advice. When someone tells you who they are, listen.

>>threat+C3
I do not call that a censorship of speech decision, it's a banning encouraging the competition decision, no? The company doesn't want competitors being boosted, so it makes and enforces a policy. I presume people discussing the Fediverse as a concept are not routinely suspended, although I'm too lazy to check.

>>blactu+74
I'm sorry to hear you're called slurs. They seem endemic for my kid as well as soon as you move out of ultra progressive areas; as a white parent of a black kid, it's disheartening and eye opening to find out just how racist some families are, and how immensely wide spread it is.

That said, I don't think this qualifies as newly minted removal of speech. It is the allowance of speech that was formerly removed.

>>threat+C3
That's a great example of the insincerity of the PG article. I mean, I can believe there are people that don't pay very much attention to Twitter who genuinely believe that Elon Musk is the sort of free speech absolutist he says he is, but someone who was suspended and then left Twitter because a new Elon censorship policy praising Elon for not censoring anyone is quite funny.

>>vessen+N6
He does not allow the use of the word cisgender, in any context, for one

>>jrflow+S4
No, I didn't make any statement on Musk's politics; it wasn't the part of the comment that interested me.

To the extent you slightly implied you were interested in what I think, he certainly seems trending far-right to me, but I think you need to moderate any thoughts on Musk with the reminder that he loves the drama, enjoys trolling, and has an almost unique freedom (in the west) to say whatever he likes online. Combine that with the drugs and his current ego trip, and I don't think it's that easy to say what he actually thinks, and I certainly don't think it's worth a lot of my time to consider it deeply.

I agree that banning cis while allowing the n-word is a concrete example, thank you. Super dumb. Speaking as a cishet guy. Also, banning cis seems essentially performative for Musk's (target?) audience(s?) -- I note that anti-trans rhetoric was one of the major platform points for Republicans in this election, so it's not, like, risky performativism, just run of the mill performativism.

>>blactu+f7
This is so vigorous that the standalone term "cis", is frequently targeted for visibility reduction even when used outside of the context of gender.

>>vessen+G5
So you imagine Discord punishing you for talking about Slack? Or Google suspending your account for talking about TikTok? On the matter of customers talking about marketplace alternatives... your instincts say "oh yes, let's exclude this from the discussion of free speech?"

>>threat+X8
Nope, I don't imagine this because those companies make different promises to their users than X does to its. They, none of them, are part of the commons of US discourse, embedded in our infrastructure. They'd have to be universal or nearly so to even qualify for most definitions of the way the word 'censorship' applies under the US 1st amendment.

I don't take my business to Twitter, and that's fine. I choose to use Discord because, in very small part, I guess, of its attitude on content. Google would no doubt ban me for some sorts of content, but not most. Again, these are business decisions that any of these companies can make; some will lose them users (money), some will gain, that's all fine with me; they'll (generally) adjust to making the most money, e.g. serving the most economically large portion of their user base they can attract.

Musk's a wild card because he can (mostly) afford to pay extra to get a different mix of users than might be totally economically optimal, but history shows that most significant and impactful companies trend hard toward serving their customer base and trying to expand it as widely as possible.

Free speech is alive and well in the US; I can publish a website with nearly anything I want to say on it, and if it's taken down, I am allowed access to Federal courts to determine if that takedown was legal. I can email it, I can print it on broadsheets and distribute it anywhere I want, I can text it out en-masse. I cannot say whatever I want on a Disney forum, however, and that, like Twitter does not impact the question of whether or not we have free speech.

>>notaha+47
... Or he is well placed to make an even-handed assessment? If your prior is that people generally are smart and have agency, it seems like you might not want to discard pg's opinion out of hand.

Agreed that Elon doesn't seem to be as much of a free speech absolutist as he promised, especially if you hurt his feelings, or seem fun to ban.

>>blactu+f7
Yep, this was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and it's the only example I've heard of. Like I said elsewhere, seems performative to me.

>>vessen+(OP)
Its interesting how doing something is immediately equated with 'removing not far right' free speech.

The idea is he promotes the talking points that benefit the right and the Republicans. Both personally and in changing the platforms algorithms [1].

There have been reports of people disagreeing with that general 'platform' loosing their blue check marks [2], accounts being disabled, followers dropped [3] and so on to reduce the reach of left/liberal people.

He doesn't need to remove speech he disagrees with, he can drown it and amplify the messages he wants to be heard and significantly control the narrative and discussion that way.

[1]https://eprints.qut.edu.au/253211/1/A_computational_analysis...

[2]https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-accused-...

[3]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-twitter-accounts-left-los...

>>snotro+b2
TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are generally left-wing, despite holding a reactionary view on trans people. That sort of comes with the territory of being a radical feminist. If someone is right-wing, or even just a centrist liberal feminist, then they're just an ordinary transphobe, not a TERF.

>>Compos+Le
While you may be right by academic classification, most TERF studies I've seen and most notable TERF accounts on X are almost exclusively far right-wing, because it is an inherently conservative stance even if the grounding starting position is more socially progressive.

>>vessen+y8
> I think you need to moderate any thoughts on Musk

The idea that forming an opinion about somebody based on what they publicly repeatedly say and do over the course of years is somehow the wrong approach with This One Guy is an act of unnecessary and unjustified generosity. “Loving the drama” is not in any way exclusive to having actual opinions, and trolls are not magical beings that exist in an inscrutable superposition of possible realities that they may or may not support.

It is downright silly when someone’s conduct is so clear that the only way to defend them is to handwave away everything that they say and do and retreat into the philosophical ideal of the unknowability of a man’s heart. That is an academic exercise that’s only useful in analyzing fictional characters and has negative value when applied to real-life powerful people that fund politicians and buy social media sites to forcibly mold public discussion to fit their values.

>>jrflow+Oi
I'm not defending Mr. Musk at all. I'm saying it's pointless to spend more than 0.0001% of my time or brainpower thinking about him and his politics -- a COMPLETE waste of time exceeded perhaps only by reading his Tweets, be they heartfelt or performative or trolling. To the extent I'm thinking about Elon, I'm thinking about what led to his success, and how those lessons might apply to me or people I'm supporting.

>>vessen+kc
Well if we agree that Elon's regime is pretty ban-happy (his own published data agrees too), I don't see how we come to the conclusion that a statement praising Elon for making Twitter "neutral" and "without censorship" after literally seeing his posts censored under Elon policy is an "even handed assessment". It's precisely because I think PG is smart and has agency that I assume he's someone that's aware of obvious benefits to ingratiating himself with the new regime rather than oblivious to how Elon actually runs the place.

>>Compos+Le
TERFs outed themselves as exclusionary. As such, they can't be left wing, even if they would like to align with it on some other principles. You can't be humanistic only towards some humans.

>>vessen+2c
Publishing a website is about as good as writing a book and dropping it off in an alley trashcan. You may have a voice but you won't be given volume or oxygen. X actively drops visibility for posts linking to external sites, and bot generated blogs are polluting Google so badly that you have no luck for organic reach.

Free speech requires public spaces [digital townhalls], but any journalist breaking critical news of Musk gets muted or banned on X. [https://thespectator.com/topic/spectator-story-debunking-elo...]. This is why several major global journal outlets have taken to just entirely leaving X in protest [https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/journalists_leaving_x_bl...].

>>vessen+6m
Saying “we don’t know what he actually thinks” is a defense. You only ever see people use that line when it comes to his politics, but never say, to question whether he actually likes Diablo 4 or AI.

When it comes to things that people find mundane or agreeable, the stuff he posts about all day reflects what he thinks but when he gives fifty million dollars to Stephen Miller[1] in 2022 to fund his Citizens for Sanity ads[2], maybe he’s trolling or it’s drugs or whatever.

> I'm thinking about what led to his success, and how those lessons might apply to me or people I'm supporting.

This is quite literally a defense of his character. If your response to “this guy sucks, here is proof that this guy sucks” is “there is literally nothing bad he could do that justifies thinking about anything other than the positives about him”, that is what defending a person looks like.

1

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4912754-musk-donated-m...

2

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/who-is-behind-citize...

>>snotro+gp
We're "exclusionary" in the sense that we want males be excluded from spaces intended for women and girls, yes. This is entirely compatible with left-wing political views.

Really, this should be uncontroversial.

>>vessen+(OP)
> how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"

In Dec 2022 he suspended the accounts of several left-leaning journalists without providing a cohesive justification: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/technology/twitter-suspen...

Posting about Ukraine is categorised as misinformation and downranked: https://x.com/aakashg0/status/1641976925064245249

Suppression of tweets in India and Turkey: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/twitter-takes-down-po... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors...