from the free-speech-relativist dept

The inevitable has happened and Elon has started banning and suppressing the speech of folks who were “on his team,” leading to many suddenly realizing that maybe he wasn’t such a free speech supporter after all.

Look, we’ve spent the better part of the last three years pointing out that Elon Musk does not understand free speech and has often worked directly against basic principles of free speech. He has filed numerous lawsuits that seek to suppress speech. And even if you want to claim he somehow took a more “free speech” approach to running ExTwitter than his predecessors, you’d still be wrong.

He has regularly banned journalists who anger him or shut down reporting that challenges his political allies. He has repeatedly throttled links to sites he views as competitive and recently admitted to suppressing posts with links to news sources.

And, of course, when it matters most for free speech, in pushing back against government attempts at suppression, Musk has shown that he’s a pushover for authoritarian demands, so long as he is supportive of the government in question. While he has occasionally stood up to when he ideologically disagrees with the government, these seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Even Elon’s own ExTwitter transparency report admits that under his watch, account suspensions have tripled compared to what they were pre-Musk.

There is no measure under which you can say that Elon is a bigger supporter of free speech than the previous management of Twitter, except in the very, very narrow category of “allowing bigoted Elon Musk fans to be loudly disruptive on the platform.”

And now, even that is coming back to bite him a bit.

In the last week, a bunch of MAGA folks called out Elon for his support for H1B visas and other attempts to bring in high-skilled tech workers to the US. Given that many of the MAGA supporters have spent much of the last two years falsely claiming that Elon was “bringing free speech back,” it was almost amusing to watch them slowly realize that he’s willing to suspend them or to take away their premium features on the site when he gets angry with them.

The most prominent account was Laura Loomer, whose biggest claim to fame seems to be her ability to get banned from platforms.

Musk then used the favorite trick to justify account suppression not being an attack on free speech by redefining spam to mean something… totally unrelated to spam.

Musk’s explanation raises more questions than it answers. This is Elon retconning a justification for the suppression of certain accounts. First, he claims that the algorithm is set to “maximize unregretted user-seconds,” a made-up, impossible-to-calculate stat that he’s talked about for a while now. He then claims that the way the algorithm does this is by rating certain accounts based on how frequently other paying accounts mute or block them. But then he adds a caveat: if he discovers a brigading campaign by accounts to mute/block other accounts in an attempt to suppress their reach, ExTwitter can magically parse out the real mutes/blocks from the fake brigaded ones, and declare some accounts to be “spam.”

This is all a lot of nonsense for Elon to be able to suppress any speech he wants and try to justify it as spam (just like he’s done in the past by redefining “doxxing.”) Of course, as with Elon’s ever-changing definition of doxxing to justify his own actions, I imagine that his legion of fans will continue to buy into his nonsense definition of spam.

Well, except for those MAGA faithful who are now furious that their faces are being eaten by the Leopards Eating Faces Party they supported.

In other words, Musk reserves the right to unilaterally decide which blocks and mutes are “legitimate” and which are not, based on criteria known only to him. This arbitrary and opaque process is a far cry from a principled commitment to free speech.

(Also, I won’t even get into how his tweet misunderstands the whole “live by the sword/die by the sword” line, but will leave that as an exercise for readers).

The end result of this, though, came down to Musk pleading with people to stop being such assholes on his site he took over specifically to unban people for being assholes.

I mean, it’s not like we didn’t warn Elon exactly how this would go. And, it’s not like we haven’t written about how content moderation teams aren’t about ideology. They just wish everyone would stop being jerks, which is the key to any site that allows user-generated content.

I know that I’m banging the drum over this over and over again, but it’s because there are still a ton of people insisting, falsely, that Elon Musk has some sort of principled take on free speech, when it’s been made clear over and over and over and over again that his take is based entirely on his own whims of what he wants, and not any actual understandable conception of free speech.

No matter how many times Musk is caught red-handed suppressing speech he doesn’t like, a vocal contingent will likely continue to buy into the myth of him as a “free speech absolutist.” But for anyone willing to look objectively at his actions rather than his words, the reality is undeniable. Elon Musk’s “free speech” posture is nothing more than a flimsy rhetorical cover for his own desire to control the discourse.

Yes, he has every right to do this on his own platform, but so too did the operators of Twitter before him. Musk may draw the lines of content moderation slightly differently than the previous team, but he certainly seems to draw them much more arbitrarily according to his personal whims.

Filed Under: content moderation, doxxing, elon musk, free speech, h1-b visas, immigration, laura loomer, maga, spam

Companies: twitter, x