Many people are very worried about Elon censoring others. He has already done that before.
I for one, if you made me pick an example, would point to his treatment of Vernon Unsworth.
There are varying definitions of 'censorship' floated in this thread. A lot of people in this thread who are defenders of Musk are willing to apply the label censorship to 'canceling people'...or at least when certain people get push back. If we take their definition at the word, if we take it as honest, then it is reasonable to apply to his own actions.
vis a vis, by the definition of censorship floated in support of Musks purchase, he censored Vernon.
Do I buy that definition? no...but...I don't think 'cancelling' is censorship, I think its just another form of free speech thats given a hostile label to bound free speech in a hierarchical way.
Otherwise, and its worth noting this actually highlights the subtext of the overall conversation, there are two definitions of censorship being applied by some people - a broader one to speech they like, and a narrower one to speech they don't.
Elon strikes me as an insecure man and opportunistic free speech champion. I don't think accounts like TESLAcharts would survive on the new Twitter. Stonks are supposed to go up, so your speech is definitely free to help that.
Once people like that get rid of inconvenient to them speech limitations, they inevitably end up with new ones, overt or hidden. There is never unconditional free speech in any society.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-of...
"I mean, frankly a top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter," he said. "I think these influence … They make the product much worse. If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, I would have a hundred billion dogecoin."
https://www.thestreet.com/.amp/technology/twitter-deal-bots
In fact, I think Twitter announced new measures of linking bots to bot operators back in Feb, so I have no idea why this bothers Elon so much (unless being identified as the owner of the entire Tesla bot horde is exactly what he is worrying about).