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It only goes against his "free speech thing" if his "free speech thing" was actually a coherent ideology. Instead his "free speech absolutism" is a brand, it's

It only goes against his "free speech thing" if his "free speech thing" was actually a coherent ideology. Instead his "free speech absolutism" is a brand, it's there to signal what kind of person he is, it's not a set of principles and therefore cannot stand up to scrutiny.

halfjoking 4y ago
Musk has repeatedly said that inciting violence will be banned while other forms of speech will be allowed. So I think he has a coherent ideology, but it still depends on a judgment call. When Kanye says he "loves Nazis" one could make the judgment he's endorsing violence against Jews because the context involves the history of what Nazis did. When Trump said on Jan 6th he wants his supporters to "fight" to "stop the steal" a lot of people took that as endorsing violence to storm the capitol. I think that's less clear-cut than Nazi endorsement, but other people disagree. Main thing I care about is "covid misinformation" is no longer banned. So Twitter won't ban an epidemiologist who posts a clinical study saying mRNA vaccines lower sperm counts anymore. https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/im-an-md-suspended-by-twitter-for-tweeting-a-link-to-a-scientific-article-on-covid-19-vaccine-lowering-sperm-counts/ https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/im-an-md-suspended-by-... Bans like that were just absurd.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  There is a legal definition to fall back on in the case of inciting violence, and what Kanye said doesn't come close. Not that Twitter is obligated to hold to that definition, but I think it's pretty misleading to say you are for "free speech" and then define "inciting violence" so broadly as to have virtually no meaning.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  Incitement AFAIK requires eminence, it would not include publicly declaring a fondness of certain people, even if those people were violent. If that were so everyone wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt or declaring a fondness for The Communist Manifesto would also be incitement. The real reason is that Kayne was booted is that he toxic waste and having him on Twitter would have damaged the Twitter brand and cost Elon money.
- themitigating 4y ago
  How was (paraphrasing) "going defcon on the jews" not inciting violence? Edit: I want to add that I don't believe this is due to his manic depressive disorder but because he's a naraasstic asshole. Posting a picture of a swastika then saying how the Nazis and Hitler are great is the most obvious way to get attention. Fuck Kayne West
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    Is that officially what got Kanye banned? My understanding is that Twitter did not specify what exactly (i.e. which set of tweets) Kanye is banned for.
    - atchoo 4y ago
      I think they kind of have. Musk replied "that's fine" to Ye posting the Musk yacht photo and "that is not" to the Star of David Nazi symbol which suggests that was the final line for the ban. The "going deathcon one on the Jews", which led to the pre-Musk ban, is arguably a more explictly a violent threat than the symbol.
      - themitigating 4y ago
        The swastika itself represents historical violence on the Jews. I would argue it alone is an explicit threat of violence because I can't see what other meaning today it could have?
        bashinator 4y ago
        My parents have a vintage carpet with some eastern (counterclockwise) swastikas on it. That said, the context around your comment is completely apparent and the downvote are troubling to say the least. I hope it's just unhelpful pedantry rather than pedantry as a cover for bigotry.
        hutzlibu 4y ago
        The swastiska has had a very long history, before the Nazis misused it for their purpose. wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika So when kayne used it, of course he referred to the Nazi symbol and just wanted attention and strongly hint at his antisemitism. But other people can mean something very different: "In several major Indo-European religions, the swastika symbolises lightning bolts, representing the thunder god and the king of the gods, such as Indra in Vedic Hinduism, Zeus in the ancient Greek religion, Jupiter in the ancient Roman religion, and Thor in the ancient Germanic religion."
guerrilla 4y ago
> it's there to signal what kind of person he is An incoherent person? What do you mean?
- ideamotor 4y ago
  It signals that he’s full of shit and will do or say anything for the grift.
hungryforcodes 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand thus.
enumjorge 4y ago
> is a brand I wish more people would understand this. For people like Musk, his personal brand is extremely important and they spend a lot of effort portraying and selling a specific image. It is an important part of his success as a businessman. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is another example. His disheveled, messy geek look was calculated, and in an interview after FTX’s collapse he basically admitted that some of his opinions and philosophies that he espoused before were BS to push a specific narrative. Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does. In his view Twitter is free speech. An attack on Twitter (as he alleged Apple was doing) is an attack on free speech. Twitter dying means the death of free speech. To claim that a company is the embodiment of free speech is ridiculous yet so many people buy into it.
- jcampbell1 4y ago
  Elon Musk becomes a Fox News darling right before he launches an electric pickup truck. He obviously doesn’t want Tesla to be a brand associated with left wing politics.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Which way around is cause and effect? An ex of mine is a literal communist, and her beliefs about Musk 5 years ago appear to have made their way to people I assume to be mainstream American left-wing (hard to be sure as I’m not American, but it’s the vibe I’m getting).
    - jcampbell1 4y ago
      That is the idea, you lose some left supporters of your brand in exchange for some right leaning supporters. Elon Musk believes this trade off is neutral to positive. Maybe he is wrong, but the anecdote about your communist ex doesn’t amount to much other than the brand has become less liked in your circle.
  - DFHippie 4y ago
    If he manages to get conservatives to buy EVs to own the libs, that will be awesome. It's a pretty weird theory though: make yourself anathema to your core market, liberals with money, in hopes of winning over the anti-environmentalists. It's even weirder seeing as its timed to coincide with every other car manufacturer in the world entering the market and gunning for your market segment.
rpgmaker 4y ago
there's more to it than that.. but the steps he's making are certainly better than the previous status quo. The enemy of my enemy so on and so forth.
skeeter2020 4y ago
I agree. He's signalling a desired outcome: I'm your free speech champion. His actions do not need to reflect this as long as the intellectually lazy just accept this, and I mean rely on our lazy system 1 to judge and move on, vs. the work of cataloging and analyzing his actual past acts to see if they match his loud words.
Dig1t 4y ago
Well his free speech thing was also stated alongside the fact that he wanted to authenticate everybody. Free speech can work if real identities and reputations are clearly visible. Anonymity combined with free speech is what creates the places most normal people don't want to be.
- krapp 4y ago
  This isn't true. We've tried real-world identities on the internet numerous times, most broadly when Google merged G+ and Youtube, but also a lot of USENET identifiers and signatures included a person's real name, or easily identifiable version of it. It accomplishes absolutely nothing - people are perfectly willing to put their real name and reputation behind their harrassing and toxic behavior. It does, however, make it easier to extend harassment campaigns to people's homes, businesses, families, etc.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    This is already happening on Twitter today. Just like people are happy to have signs on the gardens or stickers on their truck they are more than willing to tell people their views online. Especially because they don't work for some multi-national that cares what their political views are. And so there are no consequences for whatever they say or do.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Precisely. My local NextDoor has a local business owner posting foul trolling pretty much nonstop. Under the same name his business operates under. Seems to do fine.
- hairofadog 4y ago
  On the other hand, both Ye and Alex Jones are banned under Musk.

halfjoking 4y ago

Musk has repeatedly said that inciting violence will be banned while other forms of speech will be allowed. So I think he has a coherent ideology, but it still depends on a judgment call. When Kanye says he "loves Nazis" one could make the judgment he's endorsing violence against Jews because the context involves the history of what Nazis did. When Trump said on Jan 6th he wants his supporters to "fight" to "stop the steal" a lot of people took that as endorsing violence to storm the capitol. I think that's less clear-cut than Nazi endorsement, but other people disagree. Main thing I care about is "covid misinformation" is no longer banned. So Twitter won't ban an epidemiologist who posts a clinical study saying mRNA vaccines lower sperm counts anymore. https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/im-an-md-suspended-by-twitter-for-tweeting-a-link-to-a-scientific-article-on-covid-19-vaccine-lowering-sperm-counts/ https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/im-an-md-suspended-by-... Bans like that were just absurd.

fallingknife 4y ago
There is a legal definition to fall back on in the case of inciting violence, and what Kanye said doesn't come close. Not that Twitter is obligated to hold to that definition, but I think it's pretty misleading to say you are for "free speech" and then define "inciting violence" so broadly as to have virtually no meaning.
cjbgkagh 4y ago
Incitement AFAIK requires eminence, it would not include publicly declaring a fondness of certain people, even if those people were violent. If that were so everyone wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt or declaring a fondness for The Communist Manifesto would also be incitement. The real reason is that Kayne was booted is that he toxic waste and having him on Twitter would have damaged the Twitter brand and cost Elon money.
themitigating 4y ago
How was (paraphrasing) "going defcon on the jews" not inciting violence? Edit: I want to add that I don't believe this is due to his manic depressive disorder but because he's a naraasstic asshole. Posting a picture of a swastika then saying how the Nazis and Hitler are great is the most obvious way to get attention. Fuck Kayne West
- lesuorac 4y ago
  Is that officially what got Kanye banned? My understanding is that Twitter did not specify what exactly (i.e. which set of tweets) Kanye is banned for.
  - atchoo 4y ago
    I think they kind of have. Musk replied "that's fine" to Ye posting the Musk yacht photo and "that is not" to the Star of David Nazi symbol which suggests that was the final line for the ban. The "going deathcon one on the Jews", which led to the pre-Musk ban, is arguably a more explictly a violent threat than the symbol.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      The swastika itself represents historical violence on the Jews. I would argue it alone is an explicit threat of violence because I can't see what other meaning today it could have?
      - bashinator 4y ago
        My parents have a vintage carpet with some eastern (counterclockwise) swastikas on it. That said, the context around your comment is completely apparent and the downvote are troubling to say the least. I hope it's just unhelpful pedantry rather than pedantry as a cover for bigotry.
      - hutzlibu 4y ago
        The swastiska has had a very long history, before the Nazis misused it for their purpose. wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika So when kayne used it, of course he referred to the Nazi symbol and just wanted attention and strongly hint at his antisemitism. But other people can mean something very different: "In several major Indo-European religions, the swastika symbolises lightning bolts, representing the thunder god and the king of the gods, such as Indra in Vedic Hinduism, Zeus in the ancient Greek religion, Jupiter in the ancient Roman religion, and Thor in the ancient Germanic religion."

guerrilla 4y ago

> it's there to signal what kind of person he is An incoherent person? What do you mean?

ideamotor 4y ago
It signals that he’s full of shit and will do or say anything for the grift.

hungryforcodes 4y ago

I'm not sure I understand thus.

enumjorge 4y ago

> is a brand I wish more people would understand this. For people like Musk, his personal brand is extremely important and they spend a lot of effort portraying and selling a specific image. It is an important part of his success as a businessman. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is another example. His disheveled, messy geek look was calculated, and in an interview after FTX’s collapse he basically admitted that some of his opinions and philosophies that he espoused before were BS to push a specific narrative. Musk has repeated “free speech” enough times that it’s become part of his brand. And people will associate that with him regardless of what he actually does. In his view Twitter is free speech. An attack on Twitter (as he alleged Apple was doing) is an attack on free speech. Twitter dying means the death of free speech. To claim that a company is the embodiment of free speech is ridiculous yet so many people buy into it.

jcampbell1 4y ago
Elon Musk becomes a Fox News darling right before he launches an electric pickup truck. He obviously doesn’t want Tesla to be a brand associated with left wing politics.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Which way around is cause and effect? An ex of mine is a literal communist, and her beliefs about Musk 5 years ago appear to have made their way to people I assume to be mainstream American left-wing (hard to be sure as I’m not American, but it’s the vibe I’m getting).
  - jcampbell1 4y ago
    That is the idea, you lose some left supporters of your brand in exchange for some right leaning supporters. Elon Musk believes this trade off is neutral to positive. Maybe he is wrong, but the anecdote about your communist ex doesn’t amount to much other than the brand has become less liked in your circle.
- DFHippie 4y ago
  If he manages to get conservatives to buy EVs to own the libs, that will be awesome. It's a pretty weird theory though: make yourself anathema to your core market, liberals with money, in hopes of winning over the anti-environmentalists. It's even weirder seeing as its timed to coincide with every other car manufacturer in the world entering the market and gunning for your market segment.

rpgmaker 4y ago

there's more to it than that.. but the steps he's making are certainly better than the previous status quo. The enemy of my enemy so on and so forth.

skeeter2020 4y ago

I agree. He's signalling a desired outcome: I'm your free speech champion. His actions do not need to reflect this as long as the intellectually lazy just accept this, and I mean rely on our lazy system 1 to judge and move on, vs. the work of cataloging and analyzing his actual past acts to see if they match his loud words.

Dig1t 4y ago

Well his free speech thing was also stated alongside the fact that he wanted to authenticate everybody. Free speech can work if real identities and reputations are clearly visible. Anonymity combined with free speech is what creates the places most normal people don't want to be.

krapp 4y ago
This isn't true. We've tried real-world identities on the internet numerous times, most broadly when Google merged G+ and Youtube, but also a lot of USENET identifiers and signatures included a person's real name, or easily identifiable version of it. It accomplishes absolutely nothing - people are perfectly willing to put their real name and reputation behind their harrassing and toxic behavior. It does, however, make it easier to extend harassment campaigns to people's homes, businesses, families, etc.
- threeseed 4y ago
  This is already happening on Twitter today. Just like people are happy to have signs on the gardens or stickers on their truck they are more than willing to tell people their views online. Especially because they don't work for some multi-national that cares what their political views are. And so there are no consequences for whatever they say or do.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Precisely. My local NextDoor has a local business owner posting foul trolling pretty much nonstop. Under the same name his business operates under. Seems to do fine.
hairofadog 4y ago
On the other hand, both Ye and Alex Jones are banned under Musk.