Comment by threatofrain
5 days ago
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.
Well if we agree that Elon's regime is pretty ban-happy (his own published data agrees too), I don't see how we come to the conclusion that a statement praising Elon for making Twitter "neutral" and "without censorship" after literally seeing his posts censored under Elon policy is an "even handed assessment". It's precisely because I think PG is smart and has agency that I assume he's someone that's aware of obvious benefits to ingratiating himself with the new regime rather than oblivious to how Elon actually runs the place.
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?"
Nope, I don't imagine this because those companies make different promises to their users than X does to its. They, none of them, are part of the commons of US discourse, embedded in our infrastructure. They'd have to be universal or nearly so to even qualify for most definitions of the way the word 'censorship' applies under the US 1st amendment.
I don't take my business to Twitter, and that's fine. I choose to use Discord because, in very small part, I guess, of its attitude on content. Google would no doubt ban me for some sorts of content, but not most. Again, these are business decisions that any of these companies can make; some will lose them users (money), some will gain, that's all fine with me; they'll (generally) adjust to making the most money, e.g. serving the most economically large portion of their user base they can attract.
Musk's a wild card because he can (mostly) afford to pay extra to get a different mix of users than might be totally economically optimal, but history shows that most significant and impactful companies trend hard toward serving their customer base and trying to expand it as widely as possible.
Free speech is alive and well in the US; I can publish a website with nearly anything I want to say on it, and if it's taken down, I am allowed access to Federal courts to determine if that takedown was legal. I can email it, I can print it on broadsheets and distribute it anywhere I want, I can text it out en-masse. I cannot say whatever I want on a Disney forum, however, and that, like Twitter does not impact the question of whether or not we have free speech.
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