Hacker News Reader

Comment by benevol | Hacker News Reader

Britain? All major media outlets and social network platforms worldwide now have established censorship as "the new normal".

The only mainstream platform now setting itself up to become the exception to this is the one platform that since a few weeks gets consistently attacked by the establishment: Twitter.

View on HN

With this new UK legalization it outreach to private communication (messengers, no matter encrypted or not) as well.

Well, the establishment can go to hell. I'm signing up for a Twitter account again, never thought I'd go back there.

Don’t make me laugh. Have you seen how many people have been banned from Twitter in the last week because they criticized its manchild-in-chief?

No, I haven't, but I'm interested to hear about it. Got any reading material?

A whole bunch of people including a few minor celebrities got banned after changing their username to "Elon Musk" and tweeting jokes in response to the self proclaimed "free speech absolutist" declaring that unlabelled parodies would be an automatic ban. Apparently even names like "Elon Musk (Parody)" lost posting privileges

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/07/twitter-w...

Ah, gotcha. Though, I'm not sure impersonating someone else falls under free speech, right? I mean, if Weird Al did some parody songs and marketed them as the original artists, he'd get sued...unless he made it clear it was parody. Right?

I bet you'd get banned for impersonating anyone on twitter, not just Musk. Or was that not happening?

Parody absolutely does fall under speech, not only being legal and considered valuable for political discourse even in places with strong restrictions on other types of speech but also having explicit case law protecting it under the First Amendment. (Copyright law is a different matter, but nobody is selling their "Elon Musk" accounts). Of course, private websites are perfectly entitled to ban it, just as they were entitled to ban other stuff (there are reasonable grounds for thinking some unlabelled parody may be problematic, but there's a school of thought that racial hatred might actually be worse!). But it's impossible for Elon to credibly masquerade as a "free speech absolutist" whilst simply changing the guidelines to focus bans on stuff that annoys him more than the stuff that used to be banned.

I'm sure some other people were banned for unlabelled parodying accounts under the new rule too, but they're busy stopping people using labels as obvious as "Elon Musk (Parody)" too...

Lmao, no offense but holy damn the mental gymnastics going on there.

> Great to see free speech finally thriving on Twitter now that Musk has taken over!!

> See but Musk is banning people for making fun of him, even accounts clearly labeled as "parody".

> Hmm sure, but then again does parody really fall under free speech?

Dear god

Free speech is free speech. It's not "you're free to say things I like", especially as defined by some slightly-deranged billionaire CEO. Plus, parody is the bread and butter of comedians making fun of politicians since at least ancient rome.

For what's worth, Musk had already been notorious before for attempting to silence those critical of him. And let's not even get into the union-busting stuff (free speech to hurl abuse at trans people online, but not to organize collective action!).

Change my display name to Elon Mask - bam permanent suspension.

Because that's against of ToS. Impersonating someone.

"(PARODY) Elon Musk (PARODY)" still gets you banned.

If true, I disagree with that policy. But I saw plenty of people doing that who didn't get banned...

Who is Elon Mask?

Getting fired from Twitter employment is not being "banned from Twitter."

The person is talking about twitter users being banned from the platform for making fun of Musk. This seems to be happening a lot.

Who was banned for "making fun of Musk"?

Well it seems like this article is talking about suspensions, not bans, and the language some of the suspended users used is confusing:

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-users-criticizing-mu...

But there was more notably a wave of people being permanently banned for changing their display name to Elon Musk, a previously accepted behavior on Twitter:

https://time.com/6229960/twitter-bans-accounts-elon-musk-imp...

> The only mainstream platform now setting itself up to become the exception to this is the one platform that since a few weeks gets consistently attacked by the establishment: Twitter.

The platform where Nazis can say what they want but people mocking Our Lord Musk are suspended? No thanks, I prefer free speech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com