Comment by matthewdgreen
5 days ago
I was one of the people who briefly tried to take right wing “free speech” arguments at face value, eg when Elon Musk bought Twitter. Almost instantly he began allowing white supremacists and actual declared neo-Nazis back onto the platform, while kicking people off for any speech he didn’t like. I don’t think the claim “the recent right wing enthusiasm for ‘free speech’” does, in fact, selectively benefit Nazis and white supremacists” is actually wrong when you evaluate the effects.
Would you argue that the "kicking off" is more or less intense under Elon vs. the other guy?
My impression that the rate of censorship overall has plummeted. Pre-Elon, it was easy to get banned for wrongthing. People would gang up on wrongthinkers, mass-report them, etc.
I wonder what the rates of actual bans have been.
https://fortune.com/2024/09/25/twitter-x-account-suspensions...
tripled.
They just want to protect nazi speech, like I said in the downvoted comment.
I don't care what your vibes are here.
They aren't even against actual anti-semitism. Happy merchant memes, george soros conspiracies, protocols stuff, that's all A-ok because it's nazi stuff.
If you have the wrong opinion on israel palestine, it's the concentration camp for you.
The first group the nazis sent were social democrats, peace activists, journalists ... The famous nazi book burning was at an lgbt institute. I mean they're just doing nazi shit. I don't know why this isn't clear.
Thanks for looking that up.
Without knowing the denominator (# of accounts, # of posts, # of new accounts), I'm not sure what to make of it.
Even then, we want the subset of bans that were for political reasons (i.e., supporting Labour is fine, supporting Reform is hate speech). According to the actual report (which can be found here: https://transparency.x.com/content/dam/transparency-twitter/...), of 5,296,870 account suspensions only 2,361 were for "hateful conduct", while 57,185 were "violent and hateful entities" and 1,102,778 were for "abuse and harassment". Eyeing the categories, those are the only ones that seem plausible for political motivation.
So it's some subset of that 1,162,324 (22% of total) that we're interested in. I would bet the vast, vast majority of those either aren't politically motivated, or are politically motivated but in such a way that virtually everyone would agree (e.g., torturing puppies for fun).
And, of course, among politically-motivated bans, not all will be in support of Red Team / against Blue Team. Some will be bans of Red Team supporters, and for some the valence won't be clear.
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This is a general argument and has nothing to do with Elon Musk. He capitalizes on a weak position some of his political opponents bring forward. Not giving him the opportunity for that would have cost nothing... on the contrary.