Elon Musk, King of Censorship: 10 Times the ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Silenced Twitter Users – By Thomas Germain (Gizmodo) / June 25, 2023
Musk says he loves free speech. His track record says different.
Elon Musk talks a big game about freedom of expression. The billionaire refers to himself as a “free speech absolutist,” and spent the last year making bold promises about undoing Twitter’s perceived history of suppressing distasteful ideas. But the old saying goes, you should judge a man by his actions, not his words. By that metric, it seems Musk loves censorship, and the list of examples just keeps getting longer.
One shining example is Musk’s willingness to silence the opponents of foreign governments. Governments often ask social media companies to take down posts or accounts they don’t like. Before Musk took over, Twitter complied with about half of these requests. The numbers shot up under his leadership; these days, Elon’s Twitter cooperates with government censorship requests 80% of the time. All this from a man who foamed at the mouth over the self-important “Twitter Files,” internal company emails that Elon said would reveal Twitter’s earlier collaboration with the US Government. (The Twitter Files did not reveal that.)
Musk isn’t just censoring on behalf of government strong men, though. The tweeter-in-chief seems more than happy to decide what kind of speech is and isn’t allowed on Twitter based on his own personal opinions, and has a history of changing Twitter’s policies to silence people and ideas he doesn’t like.
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