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Comment by kernal | Hacker News Reader

Elon has said he’s more of a centrist. So it’s always amusing to see the far left brand him as far right because he opposes their radical ideology.

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"Watch what they do, not what they say" is a useful principle, here. There's no reason to take his attempt to self-label as a centrist at face value, but there's mountains of evidence that he seeks to amplify the right.

The previous regime of twitter censored accounts that are to the right, so when that's your idea of a normal, any change that allows all sides to share a platform could be interpreted to "amplify the right".

It isn't clear to me that accounts to the right were more or less likely to break platform rules. Has there been any analysis?

In 2019 Quillette claimed to have hard data that "Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals".[1]

Their data includes upstanding examples of Conservatism such as The American Nazi Party. I kid you not. There's a bunch of accounts in their set where you can have a reasonable discussion about where the limits should be, but tons of them are literal actual self-described Nazis. There's an overview at e.g. [2].

So yes, colour me sceptical on these types of claims.

[1]: https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...

[2]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette#Banning_Neo-Nazis_is...

This assertion is commonly made but never backed up with data, because it’s fiction. Elon Musk even gave full access to various people to try to find something to back that up and they found no evidence of anything like the alleged censorship campaign. Even Matt Taibi was reduced to tricks like pointing to the Biden campaign reporting tweets and hoping his readers were credulous enough not to see that those tweets were non-consensual nudity.

"North Korea says it's a democracy. So it's always amusing to see the far left brand it as a dictatorship because it opposes their radical ideology."

he's just a reactionary; he doesn't have any coherent principles beyond self interest and reacting to things

Sure, and the nazis were socialist

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