Comment by vessenes
6 days ago
Sorry, can you back this up with some data and specificity?
I understand that you feel Musk is aligned with the far right; my question is what exactly is Musk doing with twitter, and (other than when people take the piss against him personally) how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"?
I'm genuinely interested in the details -- and they are hard to come by.
Elon suspended PG's account just for lightly alluding that another social media platform exists. I'm not sure why you're even bringing up the idea of free speech on Twitter. Can you imagine Discord suspending your account for lightly alluding that Slack exists?
That's a great example of the insincerity of the PG article. I mean, I can believe there are people that don't pay very much attention to Twitter who genuinely believe that Elon Musk is the sort of free speech absolutist he says he is, but someone who was suspended and then left Twitter because a new Elon censorship policy praising Elon for not censoring anyone is quite funny.
... Or he is well placed to make an even-handed assessment? If your prior is that people generally are smart and have agency, it seems like you might not want to discard pg's opinion out of hand.
Agreed that Elon doesn't seem to be as much of a free speech absolutist as he promised, especially if you hurt his feelings, or seem fun to ban.
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I do not call that a censorship of speech decision, it's a banning encouraging the competition decision, no? The company doesn't want competitors being boosted, so it makes and enforces a policy. I presume people discussing the Fediverse as a concept are not routinely suspended, although I'm too lazy to check.
So you imagine Discord punishing you for talking about Slack? Or Google suspending your account for talking about TikTok? On the matter of customers talking about marketplace alternatives... your instincts say "oh yes, let's exclude this from the discussion of free speech?"
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This is by Twitter itself, before Musk: "Our results reveal a remarkably consistent trend: In six out of seven countries studied, the mainstream political right enjoys higher algorithmic amplification than the mainstream political left." https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119
This is more recent: "We observe a right-leaning bias in exposure for new accounts within their default timelines." https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01852
You can also find a lot a testimony from users like: https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/1es2lfd/...
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Now from personal experience (I've been on Twitter since 2007 and used it virtually everyday since then):
I've heard and read a lot of such testimony in particular from user who don't post much or at all and only follow a few accounts. In the last two years they've been exposed to a lot of far right content.
I've seen how the moderation team at twitter took action before musk when reporting (often illegal) hate speech and now just respond by saying that it doesn't violates the platform rules.
I've seen on the contrary people (even journalists) and political or news organization getting locked out of their account following a far right online mob against them, and then having a hard time (sometimes to the point of giving up) getting it back because the moderation team did not act.
I can. Before he owned twitter, if someone called me the n-word or other racial slurs, action was taken. Now when that happens and I report it, they reply to tell me no rules were broken
I'm sorry to hear you're called slurs. They seem endemic for my kid as well as soon as you move out of ultra progressive areas; as a white parent of a black kid, it's disheartening and eye opening to find out just how racist some families are, and how immensely wide spread it is.
That said, I don't think this qualifies as newly minted removal of speech. It is the allowance of speech that was formerly removed.
He does not allow the use of the word cisgender, in any context, for one
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I use Twitter for machine learning research only, but somehow that account gets inundated with Maga crap. That's proof enough for me.
Sure, that's an anecdote of one instance, but it's so clear. And how would you do a proper study? I'm guessing you would need Elon's permission.
Its interesting how doing something is immediately equated with 'removing not far right' free speech.
The idea is he promotes the talking points that benefit the right and the Republicans. Both personally and in changing the platforms algorithms [1].
There have been reports of people disagreeing with that general 'platform' loosing their blue check marks [2], accounts being disabled, followers dropped [3] and so on to reduce the reach of left/liberal people.
He doesn't need to remove speech he disagrees with, he can drown it and amplify the messages he wants to be heard and significantly control the narrative and discussion that way.
[1]https://eprints.qut.edu.au/253211/1/A_computational_analysis...
[2]https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-accused-...
[3]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-twitter-accounts-left-los...
If your position is that awareness of Musk’s alignment with the far right is a matter of feeling rather than well-documented fact [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] then no amount of easily-accessible and readily-available detail will convince you to adjust that position.
As for an example of Elon making Twitter rules around speech he doesn’t like, here[8] is one that is very public and not hard to come by.
1 https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/02/elon-musk-nazis-kanye-twit...
2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/12/20/elo...
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/elon-musk-far-...
4 https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-...
5 https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/business/elon-musk-nazi-jokes...
6 https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/05/02/elon-musk-reinstates-...
7 https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-twitter-nazis-whit...
8 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-cis-cisgender-slur-twitter-185...
No, I didn't make any statement on Musk's politics; it wasn't the part of the comment that interested me.
To the extent you slightly implied you were interested in what I think, he certainly seems trending far-right to me, but I think you need to moderate any thoughts on Musk with the reminder that he loves the drama, enjoys trolling, and has an almost unique freedom (in the west) to say whatever he likes online. Combine that with the drugs and his current ego trip, and I don't think it's that easy to say what he actually thinks, and I certainly don't think it's worth a lot of my time to consider it deeply.
I agree that banning cis while allowing the n-word is a concrete example, thank you. Super dumb. Speaking as a cishet guy. Also, banning cis seems essentially performative for Musk's (target?) audience(s?) -- I note that anti-trans rhetoric was one of the major platform points for Republicans in this election, so it's not, like, risky performativism, just run of the mill performativism.
> I think you need to moderate any thoughts on Musk
The idea that forming an opinion about somebody based on what they publicly repeatedly say and do over the course of years is somehow the wrong approach with This One Guy is an act of unnecessary and unjustified generosity. “Loving the drama” is not in any way exclusive to having actual opinions, and trolls are not magical beings that exist in an inscrutable superposition of possible realities that they may or may not support.
It is downright silly when someone’s conduct is so clear that the only way to defend them is to handwave away everything that they say and do and retreat into the philosophical ideal of the unknowability of a man’s heart. That is an academic exercise that’s only useful in analyzing fictional characters and has negative value when applied to real-life powerful people that fund politicians and buy social media sites to forcibly mold public discussion to fit their values.
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Elevating tweets of folks that pay the troll under the bridge, where folks on the left are going to avoid that fee (why would someone on the left materially support a right wing pundit?) is one very obvious way.
Just go check out that man's X (twitter?) feed. Elon constantly says the quiet part out loud. I'm from genx and if you're younger I'm going to give you all some solid life advice. When someone tells you who they are, listen.
> how is he removing free speech that is not "far right"
In Dec 2022 he suspended the accounts of several left-leaning journalists without providing a cohesive justification: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/technology/twitter-suspen...
Posting about Ukraine is categorised as misinformation and downranked: https://x.com/aakashg0/status/1641976925064245249
Suppression of tweets in India and Turkey: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/twitter-takes-down-po... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors...
> you feel Musk is aligned with the far right
It's not a feel, it's real (unless you're so far to the right yourself, you don't consider the AfD, neo-nazis, TERFs, etc etc such)
TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are generally left-wing, despite holding a reactionary view on trans people. That sort of comes with the territory of being a radical feminist. If someone is right-wing, or even just a centrist liberal feminist, then they're just an ordinary transphobe, not a TERF.
While you may be right by academic classification, most TERF studies I've seen and most notable TERF accounts on X are almost exclusively far right-wing, because it is an inherently conservative stance even if the grounding starting position is more socially progressive.
TERFs outed themselves as exclusionary. As such, they can't be left wing, even if they would like to align with it on some other principles. You can't be humanistic only towards some humans.
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No. Even asking this question requires either bad faith or being in a coma for the last few years
He has endorsed the neo-nazi party in Germany
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If "I think we need to massively curtail people's liberty in order to remove our enemies and establish a white national ethnostate" vs "we need to stop those guys" is your idea of "ape tribalism" then I'm not sure that you're really available for reasonable discussion here.
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No, why would it be?
EDIT: the comment I’m replying to was edited at least 3 times since I posted this reply
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Create a new account and find out. If you create a new account, without any other information, twitter will recommend you follow Musk, Don Jr (President's right wing son), and Babylong Bee, a right wing fake news joke site.
Go ahead, do the experiment and come back and tell me what you see.
You don't even need a new account. You could have a years old account and you'll get notifications about that crap even if you have never followed anything even remotely similar. That's what made me delete my account. I got Musk's tweets in my notifications and noped the fuck out.
He tweeted 150x a day in support of Trump leading up to the election. Just go look at his timeline.
Edit: lol at this getting downvoted. Some of you free speech purists really don't want to hear basic facts. Seriously. Just go look at the timeline. 150x a day is not an exaggeration. All of it in direct support of Trump, or attacking DEI and anything else associated with Democrats.