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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

None of these are censorship. Petty, retaliatory, and abusive, sure. but not censorship.

It’s examples of Elon taking any advantage he can find to retaliate against people that personally piss him off. There’s no reason this wouldn’t extend to Twitter

The reason is because he has a stated principle that he would have to violate to do it through Twitter.

He didn't violate any of his stated principles with his earlier actions.

If he goes a year or two without taking such action, will you reverse your opinion?

Firing an employee for posting a video of a FSD beta-enabled Tesla is not only, as you said, retaliatory, but it is also censorship. He used that employee to set an example for others, effectively causing people to censor themselves in the future.

So is firing and even suing an employee for disseminating your proprietary code, but few would argue that that is censorship, in the free speech sense.

If someone was a purported free speech absolutist, then yes that would be censorship. It would be a violation of copyright law, but copyright law and censorship can easily be argued to go hand in hand.

Which is partly why free speech absolutists cannot exist. Eventually, everyone draws a line in the sand. In the case of Elon Musk, that line in the sand seems to move depending on whom does the censoring.

Who ever said he is an absolutist? I have only seen that claim from critics making a no true Scott's an argument. At a minimum he said he will regulate illegal content.

He's literally referred to himself as a free speech absolutist [1]. I don't know how much more explicit it can get here. Unless you want to argue that he's a hypocrite and his words have no meaning or something, in which case that's precisely the problem a lot of people have with him and his 'free speech' stance.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?s=20...

It could be argued that dissemination of someone else's speech isn't your speech, and thus there's no hypocrisy.

Sure, and neither is Twitter banning people. The argument is that Musk will silence or get retribution against people through Twitter ownership, just as he does in other contexts.

That's a more refined argument then I've heard. Yeah, I think it is possible that he might fire Twitter employees who are vocal critics of the company position. I think a lot of people still see this Petty personal retaliation as a step up from silencing people based on arbitrary politics. I am much more skeptical that he will be banning politicians from the platform or disagreeable positions

He should fire those people. In fact from day one for the first few month the objective should be cleaning house, hard. Reduce head count by 50%. In fact dig through who came up with idea to ban Babylon Bee and just fire everyone who saw that decision and was not opposed.

Politically motivated or not, he stands to dramatically increase profit margins, at least in the short term, by getting rid of people.

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