06-02-2023, 10:52 AM
(06-01-2023, 09:46 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Recent stories are about his caving to censorship demands of authoritarian governments, which when you click on the Google search you will see also reported on by Business Insider and Reason. Now, I could be in either camp of that debate because I can see both sides of that argument. Back in December, Musk suspended several journalists for reporting on an account that shared public data about Elon's private jet. Now, to be fair, they were reinstated but this was quite the controversy for a while as the journalists suspended were those that generally wrote about Musk and had been critical of him.
Now, after he took over and he had this first incident, he calmed down with this. But Musk has always displayed a desire to silence his critics in a way that was very contrary to the "free speech absolutist" cape he likes to wear. Even before he took over Twitter there were things he had said and done that really highlighted that to me.
I was aware of the censorship demands from Turkey, for example. Musk's response was essentially either agree to them or have Twitter be unavailable in Turkey entirely. Not exactly an easy decision. Free speech laws vary around the globe, as I've pointed out, the EU and UK are quite comfortable with laws against speech that I find absolutely abhorrent, so this is not confined to more authoritarian regimes by any means. As to the private jet incident(s), yes that was definitely a moment of hypocrisy, but, as you pointed out, he later reversed course.
I would respond though, with this question; is it better to have a person who believes in free speech, but sometimes doesn't fully live up to those ideals, or is it better to have a company that is obviously partisan in it's censorship? I'll take the former.
