I could understand saying something like the totality of the evidence doesn't support the conclusion that there is more free speech after Elon's takeover. So t

I could understand saying something like the totality of the evidence doesn't support the conclusion that there is more free speech after Elon's takeover. So that is probably what you mean. What you actually said though is factually inaccurate. There is evidence both for and against more free speech on Twitter. If someone can't admit that, chances are they are plagued with cognitive dissonance and highly partisan in their reasoning. For example, there is evidence that Twitter has granted amnesty to accounts that were previously censored and according to stated motivations this was done for the sake of freedom of speech. I happen to suspect that you are right and that currently some rulings are made with input outside the policy team and that this is currently happening more frequently than it used to. One thing that convinces me of this is that I frequently see people reaching out to Elon Musk directly and reporting that they have been censored in some way or the other. Then these cases seem to be resolved, with the other person praising him for ending the censoring of their political thoughts, which implies that he intervened in a policy decision. However, I'm not sure I could call this proof that banning decisions are made more arbitrarily than before since these are blacklist removing interventions rather than bans. So basically, when you claim that is now more arbitrary than it was before, that comes across to me more as your own speculation than anything definitive. We don't have proof of that. In sharp contrast, anyone who claims that the previous ownership did make arbitrary decisions does have proof. It is now a matter of public record that in some high profile cases (I happen to agree with some of them, but that is beside the point) Twitter did make arbitrary decisions rather than policy rooted decisions. In fact they did this often enough in decisions that weren't as high profile that there was a category label in the moderation reason, being called a one off. It seems the current Twitter wants to be much more transparent than the former. So it might be that at some point in the future we will be able to see the moderation metrics: if we could, then we could answer your implication with with actual data. Filter by moderation justification field and get a count both positive and negative and we would have a much better sense of whether decisions were being made arbitrarily.