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Elon Musk talks an enormous recreation about freedom of expression. The billionaire refers to himself as a “free speech absolutist,” and spent the final 12 months making daring guarantees about undoing Twitter’s perceived historical past of suppressing distasteful concepts. However the outdated saying goes, it’s best to decide a person by his actions, not his phrases. By that metric, it appears Musk loves censorship, and the listing of examples simply retains getting longer.
One shining instance is Musk’s willingness to silence the opponents of international governments. Governments typically ask social media firms to take down posts or accounts they don’t like. Earlier than Musk took over, Twitter complied with about half of those requests. The numbers shot up beneath his management; as of late, Elon’s Twitter cooperates with authorities censorship requests 80% of the time. All this from a person who foamed on the mouth over the self-important “Twitter Recordsdata,” inner firm emails that Elon mentioned would reveal Twitter’s earlier collaboration with the US Authorities. (The Twitter Recordsdata didn’t reveal that.)
Musk isn’t simply censoring on behalf of presidency robust males, although. The tweeter-in-chief appears more than pleased to resolve what sort of speech is and isn’t allowed on Twitter based mostly on his personal private opinions, and has a historical past of fixing Twitter’s insurance policies to silence folks and concepts he doesn’t like.
One instance comes from Musk’s rising obsession with the transgender group. He declared that the phrases “cis” and “cisgender” are actually thought of slurs on Twitter. These phrases usually are not slurs. “Cisgender” is a impartial, scientific time period which means the other of transgender. There isn’t any different well-known phrase for people who find themselves not transgender.
That’s peculiar conduct that appears to violate free speech champion Elon Musk’s personal private definition of free speech. In an interview final 12 months, Musk mentioned:
A great signal as as to whether there’s free speech is, is somebody you don’t like allowed to say one thing you don’t like? If that’s the case, we now have free speech. It’s rattling annoying when somebody you don’t like says one thing you don’t like. That’s the signal of a wholesome, functioning free speech state of affairs.
There are way over ten examples of Musk censoring Twitter customers as a result of they are saying and do issues he doesn’t like. Look by means of this listing and resolve for your self whether or not Elon Musk has established a “wholesome, functioning free speech state of affairs,” as he promised.
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