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Elon Musk arrived at Twitter promising to bring free speech back to social media.
He said he was a “free speech absolutist” fighting the “woke mind virus” of political correctness.
Such was his commitment to free expression, he declared, he wouldn’t even ban an account which tracked his private plane.
Seasoned observers of social media wondered how this absolutism could possibly work in practice, when online forums without any moderation quickly become too unpleasant to use, and indeed Musk appeared to moderate his views slightly, saying that low quality tweets would be demoted by Twitter’s algorithm.
These adjustments can be defended as tweaks to Musk’s overall vision.
What happened next cannot.
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First, Musk suspended the account tracking his plane.
Then he went one step further, suspending the accounts of a number of technology journalists who had reported on the story.
Musk said he acted to protect his family’s safety, citing the risk posed by sharing his real-time location, after his car was apparently followed by a threatening individual on Wednesday night.
But the account tracking his plane was collating publicly-available data and the journalists were reporting on the story, not sharing “assassination coordinates”, as Musk claimed.
Now Musk has gone further, deleting audio-sharing feature Twitter Spaces from the app entirely, after some banned journalists managed to find their way into a space to criticise him. Anyone who planned to use a Twitter Space today will have to make other plans.
Musk is entirely within his rights to make these decisions. He bought Twitter, albeit reluctantly, at a vastly inflated price. It is his toy and he can play with it any way he wants.
But how can he square this latest move with his commitment of free speech? A commitment so passionate that over the last two weeks he has been leaking the personal chat logs of former Twitter employees to…
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