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Comment by andersa | Hacker News Reader

It was always about the right wing kind of free speech - free to harass and insult people, freedom from consequences.

> It was always about the right wing kind of free speech

It was always about the kind of speech that was being banned. Movement Democrats like to think of themselves as left-wing, so everything that opposes their party becomes right-wing, including people to the left of them. Movement Democrats weren't being banned for spreading misinformation, they were being encouraged.

> free to harass and insult people, freedom from consequences.

There were only consequences on one side with old twitter.

One side was far more unruly than the other. (And still is.)

Don't forget -- freedom from having to hear left-wing ideologies or about anything uncomfortable.

Left or right, anarchic or authoritarian, theocratic (of any flavour) or atheist, populist or technocratic, radical or conservative, Apollonian or Dionysian.

There's more ways to be outside the Overton window, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

So reverse Reddit?

On what planet were liberal voices being censored in any way on twitter? Left-wingers were being banned because the liberals that filled their responses with invective, invitations for them to kill themselves, and appeals that they be arrested were mass reporting them.

Right because that's objectionable speech. You don't need to worry about non-objectionable speech because no one would care to censor it.

I don't know what you mean by freedom on consequences. I guess a consequence of speech could be to get your account banned? If anything Twitter leaving up your objectionable content would result in more likely conferences of being fired or something.

And yet, Elon has decided that a term used in academic medical research for nearly a century, “cisgender”, is a slur and banned from the platform. Funny how he wants to protect objectionable speech that aligns with his political view while restricting “objectionable” speech that doesn’t.

From Wikipedia, while the concept has been discussed since at least 1914 the actual term cisgender has apparently only been used since 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender

Cisgender is recent, but it’s also primarily used to serve as the counter to transgender. To understand “cisgender”, it’s useful to study the history of “transgender”. Transgender was introduced as a term because it encompassed a larger group of people and avoided the stigma surrounding “transsexual”. Transsexual has a history dating back about a hundred years. Since “trans-“ and “cis-“ are antonym prefixes, once you have transsexual, you have cissexual. For the purposes of Elon’s rule, it doesn’t matter whether it’s CISsexual or CISgender, he objects to “cis”.

One reason why many people, particularly feminist women, find "cisgender" a disagreeable term is because it's a linguistic concession that makes it more difficult to argue for the rights of actual female women, as it implicitly redefines "woman" to include males and "man" to include females.

Disagreeing with a particular taxonomic way of describing different types of people simply because it makes it hard to advance your political beliefs does not mean the words involved in that taxonomy are slurs. “Slur” has a particular meaning, and it isn’t “makes it hard for me to achieve my political goals”.

> Right because that's objectionable speech.

Objectionable to whom? Elon seems to have no issue blocking speech objectionable to pseudo-dictators[1] or declaring that cis/cisgendered are slurs that can get you suspended. He seems fine with blocking speech objectionable to those that agree with his political sensibilities.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/13/turkey-...

And freedom to "censor" speech they don't like.

When did he do that?

Links to Mastodon, ElonJet, the day he banned a dozen of journalists[1], etc.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/technology/twitter-suspen...

There are several instances of left wing folks being banned, he stated that "cis" will be disallowed on the platform, he's removed tweets at the behest of governments like the Saudis, and this post is literally about text disappearing, lol.

It's not hard to find instances.

Note, I think it's fine for companies to moderate speech on their platforms. No objections there. Just don't simultaneously claim you are some sort of free speech absolutist.

> There are several instances of left wing folks being banned

You understand that you were asked for one, right? This is not one, this is a vague claim being repeated.

> he stated that "cis" will be disallowed on the platform

No, he didn't. He said that "cis" being thrown as an insult to people who didn't wish to be called "cis" wouldn't automatically be discounted as harassment. Maybe I'm wrong about this - can you find a single person that was banned or censored by twitter for saying "cis?"

> It's not hard to find instances.

If it's too hard for you to do, why do you expect others to believe you when you say this?

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