It is a real shame because I wanted to continue using Twitter like I always have, but I don't think that will be possible.
Ya know, I've heard a lot worse comparisons. And I've seen this kind of thing happen there...
Knowledge and money don't a good moderator make. And Elon Musk has clearly taken on the role of moderator, not just CEO.
So, a spot on comparison.
However, that was quickly explained away as automated spam filter false positive when it was publicized. So even if it happened before, I can't think of any case other than Twitter right now when it was so open and explicit.
A quick perusal of https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/ should be sufficient to understand that subreddit mods indeed do go on power trips of capricious banning, including for the grievous sin of mentioning a competing subreddit.
Many of the popular subs will retroactively ban users for posting in other subs.
I was banned from a fair amount of subs because I had a trivial argument with a mod in one sub. IIRC it was literally an "argument" about humidity being worse than dry heat, lol.
Seeing this repeated on twitter, even if its for a day, is alarming.
I think what you meant was you didn't buy into it, and this is proving your point of view.
He's gone from freedom of speech absolutionist to defining the limits of freedom of speech by whether you discuss social interactions on other websites.
It isn't as simple as a one-dimensional scale between freedom of speech absolutism and not, and the fact that so many people seem to believe this makes me think that people don't have a basic grasp of ethics, nor an ethical framework to make decisions on.
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. This is only a small bit of his capricious rules. Earlier this week it was publicly available information about flights, now it's even indirect mentions of social media competition, what happens next week if he decides that no one should talk about other electric cars? It would be entirely in character for his actions to date. Users now have to anticipate that there is going to be a day where the rules change in such a way they earn a retroactive ban. That's not freedom of speech, that's just a tyrant who hasn't come for YOUR speech yet. I don't know why anyone would stay invested in this platform.
If there was any sort of real framework in place there would be a set list in place instead of a flood of randomly generated rules that are just "whatever is ticking Elon off today", and there wouldn't be popularity contests to see if content gets restored.
And I think anyone would be hard pushed to explain why journalists and people discussing other social media platforms should be a limit.