from the hypcorisy,-thy-name-is-elon dept

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, one of his primary stated goals was to “bring back free speech” to the platform. He was particularly critical of how Twitter had briefly blocked links to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. But now, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” is doing the very thing he criticized: banning links and suspending journalists.

We’ve discussed at great length how almost everyone misremembers and misunderstands the whole “Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

But the key factors are that Twitter chose to block the sharing of that link for 24 hours, claiming it violated its “hacked materials” policy. Many, many people (including us) called this out as bullshit, and Twitter backed down the very next day and admitted that was a mistake and said it was clarifying the policy to not include news reporting. The NY Post account wasn’t allowed to post for a couple of weeks, because it was told it had to delete the offending tweet first.

Elon has expressed his anger at Twitter for doing this a few times. When he took over the company, one of the first things he did was to give Matt Taibbi access to internal communications about that (which showed… not much of interest beyond standard discussions within the company about how to handle potentially sensitive materials). He was very excited to reveal this:

He has also suggested that those involved deserved prison time:

(FWIW, it’s absolutely false that Twitter’s actions had any impact on the election. The Federal Election Commission investigated it and found nothing. Multiple reports show that the story gained more traction after Twitter blocked links to it. The block only lasted 24 hours, and no other site blocked links. Twitter didn’t block any of the links to any other story about the laptop).

Either way, last year we called out Elon’s hypocrisy when he did the same damn thing regarding the JD Vance hacked dossier. And yet, that story disappeared after a few days, even though it was arguably worse. That also involved secretive materials that recipients weren’t supposed to have related to a Presidential campaign. And in that case, Elon had no problem blocking links and suspending the reporter.

The only real difference was that it was done under the “doxing” policy rather than under the “hacked materials” policy. Elon has a history of stretching the definition of the “doxing” policy, and ignoring it when the doxing happens to people he dislikes.

And now it’s happened again.

For a while now, a bunch of people have insisted that a huge Elon stan on ExTwitter, named Adrian Dittman, was really an Elon-alt account. The main “clue” was that Dittman sounds eerily similar to Musk. They even did a Spaces together, though many people argued that it was just Musk talking to himself.

Dittman and Musk have occasionally joked about it, but whenever anyone tried to call them out directly on it, they tended to just play coy.

Over the weekend, the Spectator published a pretty compelling argument, saying that Dittman really is not Elon, and instead is just a German dude who lives in Fiji who is a huge Elon fan who just coincidentally sounds an awful lot like Elon.

Elon even responded to a tweet about the piece (jokingly) claiming to reveal that he really is Dittman. Except, you may notice something odd here:

Yeah, the tweet Elon is responding to is not available, saying it “violated the X Rules.” The company has banned all links to the Spectator article and suspended the author, Jacqueline Sweet, for 30 days, claiming that the article violated its doxing policy.

Yup, just like the NY Post with the Hunter Biden laptop story, where Twitter told them they had to first delete the offending tweet, the new ExTwitter also says the offending tweet must be deleted to start the countdown.

And, just as with the NY Post story, anyone trying to share the link is blocked from doing so:

In no world does this violate any actual “doxxing” policy. Dittman was posting under his own name. The reporting was just confirming that Dittman is who he said he was. How is that doxxing? Revealing that someone is who they claim to be is not doxxing by any reasonable definition. It didn’t reveal his location beyond “Fiji,” a country with about a million inhabitants.

But, either way, this is again Elon doing exactly the same thing that he loudly proclaimed was so horrible before, a supposedly egregious suppression of free speech that apparently required a takeover of Twitter and a public airing of the internal discussions that resulted in that decision.

Of course, as with the JD Vance story, these actions will quickly be forgotten, while we’ll undoubtedly keep hearing the misleading (or downright false) claim that Twitter illegally suppressed the story of the Hunter Biden laptop.

Yes, Elon is free to manage ExTwitter however he wants since it’s his property. But it would be nice if some people (including Elon!) could at least have the intellectual honesty to admit (1) that he’s doing the same damn thing that he got upset at Twitter for doing and (2) that this completely undermines his claims about why he had to take over the site.

Filed Under: adrian dittman, content moderation, doxing, doxxing, elon musk, hunter biden laptop, hypocrisy, news reporting

Companies: spectator, twitter, x