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Seems like the choice was between “Turkey blocks all of Twitter for all Turkish citizens” and “Twitter blocks certain tweets or accounts for all Turkish citizen
by fwlr 3y ago
Seems like the choice was between “Turkey blocks all of Twitter for all Turkish citizens” and “Twitter blocks certain tweets or accounts for all Turkish citizens”[1], and in addition Twitter will release information on what specifically the Turkish government requested to be blocked[2].
I know Elon has endlessly declared himself a free speech absolutist, but to me this seems like a perfect test case of “free speech maximalist” vs “free speech absolutist” - in general, the maximalist preference is 100% > 99% > 98% > … > 1% > 0%, while the absolutist preference is 100% > 0% > 1-99%. If he thinks his decision here is obviously correct then he’s actually a maximalist, not an absolutist like he so often claimed.
(Personally, I think this is a surprisingly sensible approach. I’ve long thought maximalism to be superior to absolutism, almost everywhere. In the case of free speech on the internet in particular, I take it as axiomatic that “The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, and consider it an obvious corollary that minimizing the amount of damage results in the most efficient and rapid re-routing.)
1: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657422401754259461 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657422401754259461
2: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657428707995181058 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657428707995181058
- timeon 3y ago> free speech maximalist the term is: hypocrisy
- thdespou 3y agoSame old .
- dmatech 3y agoThis happened before back in 2014[1] and also involved Twitter blocking access to certain posts or accounts under the threat of a total block. What exactly are their alternatives? I suppose they could drag their feet a day or two until after the election, but after that, they'd be subject to fines, complete blocks of the site (like what happened to Wikipedia[2] for almost three years), and who knows what else. They could attempt to fight this in Turkish courts, but that might be futile. 1. https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/challenging-the-access-ban-in-turkey.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2014/challenging-t... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey
- HybridCurve 3y agoYou are over-analyzing this. People like Elon will say whatever benefits their motives, regardless of their beliefs.
- papito 3y agoI don't think that saying vile and racist things is helping his business. The only motives he seems to be having are those of a 12-year-old craving constant attention.
- foderking 3y agoalso,elon is consistent about the free speech applying as long as it is legal i the jurisdiction https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376?t=cBHhCugk-VI7BVsFf48xbg&s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376?t=cB...
- mrtksn 3y agoTesla just recently entered the highly regulated Turkish market and the Turkish government is a SpaceX customer. Just to be clear, I don’t think Musk did wrong, I think he is just a businessman who pretends to be an activist as part of his branding. He did a simple business calculation and concluded that the damage to the brand is less than the revenue from the Turkish market.
- user_named 3y ago[flagged]
- olliej 3y agoIf you're claiming to be free speech only, but then start censoring without notifying people then you are intentionally creating a system that is telling people "this is everything that is relevant" but only showing one side, then you are doing something that is objectively worse that shutting down in that location.
- gmerc 3y agoPeople need to stop caring about what elon says and instead look at what he does. The statistical likelihood of him not being a white supremacist alt-right crank is … lim -> 0 when looking at his entire corpus of work