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Comment by throwawayacc3 | Hacker News Reader

I remember for years the left's war cry was "Twitter is a private company, they do not have to host your content".

"You and your ilk can post your filth on a dozen other websites, Twitter is not a monopoly."

"Twitter isn't censoring you, they just don't want to listen to your bullshit, and they're showing you the door (relevant xkcd posted everywhere: https://xkcd.com/1357/)"

Some of us warned that if the tables turned, so would their tune. "Twitter is much like the public square, and banning dissenting voices shouldn't be celebrated" we warned. Just a few years later, here we are. I feel vindicated.

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So, "the right" has latched on to Free Speech being like a major pillar of their worldview. Musk has shifted himself to be more allied with the right. He also proclaimed that he was taking over Twitter in order to free it from censorship (ie - Twitter is the place for free speech).

Now it turns out that Musk doesn't really care about free speech. He just wants to control what the content of the speech is. This is an example that affirms the suspicions of the left: that the right's proclamations about speech are disingenuous.

As I understand it, this is why people are calling him out.

No, doxxing someone isn’t free speech anymore than saying “fire” in a crowded theater when there isn’t one is. Against the policies and rules. Doesn’t matter if it’s a CEO you dislike that is being doxxed. The people on the left are the ones being disingenuous.

still wrong. hate speech isnt protected and that was the primary type of speech banned and it really irked the right that they couldnt spew vitriol with impunity. within moments of complaining about being "doxxed" (he wasnt), elon proceeded to actually try to crowdsource a doxxing.

still wrong. hate speech isnt protected and that was the primary type of speech banned and it really irked the left that they couldnt spew vitriol with impunity. within moments of complaining about being "doxxed" (they wasnt), leftists proceeded to actually try to crowdsource a doxxing.

Leftists are mad because they no longer have the monopoly of hate on Twitter. As the saying goes, equality feels like oppression when all you've known is privilege.

i think you have a caricature of "leftists" in your mind. perhaps you dislike the degree to which "leftists" attempted to categorize hate speech, and that's fine, but you really are attempting to equate apples with oranges. taking away "privilege" from your ideological adversary when your whole premise has been "absolute" freedom doesn't really level the playing field. completely reversing course on your stated ideologies once you've attained power isn't championing anything other than hypocrisy

You are very woefully misunderstanding the source of the outrage.

It's Elon's hypocrisy. He made tons of noise about being a free-speech absolutist, but is now banning people that disagree with him.

Anybody on the right should be just as angry, but they're not because the hypocrisy benefits them.

These people know their arguments are disingenuous. It's just a tactic to derail the conversation to protect the corporations and billionaires from criticism and accountability.

These people know their arguments are disingenuous. It's just a tactic to derail the conversation to protect the narrative and groomers from criticism and accountability.

the problem is that when the people who complained about the behavior now celebrate and initiate the behavior, it renders their initial objection as insincere and self-serving. what i've seen is that a lot of this is less about complaining about the behavior, and more of a crusade to highlight the hypocrisy of both elon and his acolytes.

if he wants to ban mastodon links he's certainly welcome to do so - it's his company. it's just a bad look after positioning himself as a free speech, open market crusader who politically platformed himself as against the very thing he's doing.

Not sure how many times we must explain this, he can do what he wants with his website. But don't tell us you're a champion of free speech while capriciously silencing detractors.

"The left" never claimed to be champions for free speech. "They" sought a balance between freedom of speech and public harm. At least that's my take, I can't speak for "them."

Elon Musk calls himself a "free speech absolutist" and that if it's not illegal speech, it shouldn't be banned. Yet the moment he's at the helm, the bans start flowing for all manner of legal speech.

What I'm saying is, words have meaning. If you want to claim a principle you have to make an effort to live by it. People who claim principles and proceed to ignore them or even act contrary to them are not principled people, they're just making noise. We should not listen to them, or take what they say seriously. For unprincipled people are fairweather friends, and likely have ulterior motives.

There's the hypocrisy other posts are mentioning, as well as a general Musk fatigue.

But on top of all that, there's the feeling he ruined a place a lot of people liked. It's like if your favourite local restaurant got replaced by a McDonald's. It's not illegal, it might even find a new clientele, but now my friends and I need to find a new spot so we're a little grumpy about it.

Twitter is a private company and is not a monopoly, but anticompetitive behavior should be called out, the same way that (many) of us did about Instagram blocking links to competitors and Facebook pursuing anticompetitive policies against services like Snapchat. There are plenty of people who have campaigned for iOS to allow 3rd-party app stores that are calling out Twitter's current behavior. There's no values dissonance there, Musk banning the original account/journalists is 1st Amendment protected activity, blanket-banning Mastodon links is (potentially, but I don't know how likely it would be to ever see a court battle) anti-competitive.

More to the point, outside of antitrust there are plenty of people that have specified in the past that Twitter is a private company and can do what it wants, but that its moderation decisions are subject to private scrutiny and that consumers can complain about them. And importantly, that doesn't mean that all of its moderation decisions are universally good or bad.

"People are allowed to complain about private moderation decisions" != "All moderation decisions are exactly the same and if you complain about any of them you have to complain about all of them"

It's OK to point out that reporting about someone else posting flightplan data is different from subtly encouraging people to bomb hospitals. The point of Twitter being a private company is that it's not the government and it doesn't have to be blind to those distinctions. Private speech/moderation is the place in free speech debates where we are allowed to make actual value judgements that are more nuanced than "all censorship good/bad".

It's also completely valid for people to point out that Musk hasn't banned doxing, he's banned an extremely narrow category of doxing that is specifically designed to get rid of the one account he doesn't like, while still allowing accounts like Libsoftiktok to stick around. It's completely valid to point out that Musk announced this policy at the same time that he posted a public license plate on Twitter and asked his followers if any of them recognized it. It's valid to look at that behavior and think, "huh, maybe this has never actually been about free speech for him."

But yeah, it's not illegal for Musk to ban journalists. It's a bad business move and it's going to prompt more people to jump ship off of Twitter and it's going to prompt more publishers to think about how they disseminate content and how much they should use Twitter as part of that strategy, but it's not illegal. Anticompetitive behavior might be different (although no lawmakers cared when Facebook did it, so I'm not sure any of them are going to care now).

Turns out a lot of people on the radical left want to censor people or worse.

My office is pretty democrat and most people don't understand the twitter hysteria. It's clear now Twitter has a lot of radical left. These radical left doesn't realize most people are on Elon's side after his kid was stalked.

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