Elon “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk

I don't think that means what he thinks it means.

Via WaPo: Musk suspends journalists from Twitter, claims ‘assassination’ danger

Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.

The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.

The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.

Look, Twitter can ban what it likes. It does not violate the First Amendment in doing so, as it is a private company making a decision about who uses their product. Nothing stops others from sharing that same information (logic, I would note, that applies to the NY Post‘s Hunter Biden story or the all-important Hunter dick pics that are the subject of the “Twitter Files”).

But, it is awfully hard to claim to be a free speech absolutist and then ban journalists from reporting on a story you don’t like.

More on the jet story here: Musk bans Twitter account tracking his jet, threatens to sue creator.

Let me stress that the flight data in question is public information. (Not to be confused with the Hunter Biden photos, which were pubic, but decidedly not public).

FILED UNDER: Media, US Politics, , , , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. MarkedMan says:

    During this whole episode the people involved were banned, unbanned and banned again in the space of 24 hours, all without rational explanation. The most generous explanation for this is that it’s a case of the Silicon Valley “Fail Fast and Change Quickly” culture meeting the real world. The more likely explanation is that Musk is experiencing some sort of manic episode and Twitter does not have the guardrails in place to control him during these bouts that his other companies have.

    11
  2. Kathy says:

    The jet location, course, speed, and altitude data is public and can be accessed by the common person through several flight trackers, like Flightradar24. If you know the registration (tail number) of a plane, you can track it.

    elon, like all absolutists, is finding exceptions to his iron-clad rule. Some are sensible, others are whims and pique. In the end he’ll wind up a hypocrisy absolutist.

    5
  3. Sleeping Dog says:

    There have been several “journalists can’t quit twitter” articles recently, perhaps this will be motivation for them to move on.

    Well, probably not.

    Musk is well on his way to making twitter irrelevant and whatever his business plan is, it increasingly resembles the garden gnome biz plan.

    5
  4. BugManDan says:

    @Sleeping Dog: Is that similar to the underpants gnomes??

    Step 3, Make Lots of Money

    1
  5. Not the IT Dept. says:

    In my profession, we use social media a fair amount – although praise the FSM I don’t have to – and the talk is that Mastodon and/or Post, or even just FB or LI on their own, can give you pretty much the same impact for a lot less emo-drama. (Note this is a corporate sector; I’m not sure individual tweeters would feel the same way.) If Twitter starts seeing an avalanche of corporate cancellations, it might have an impact on Musk but by then I suspect it would be too late.

    4
  6. Sleeping Dog says:

    @BugManDan:

    yeah, I improperly recalled the name.

    1
  7. Kathy says:

    If I had the time and patience, I’d troll Elon on his decaying plattform. things like “Hey, Elon, how is Twitter supposed to help in getting people to buy land on Mars?”

    But more serious matters, “Hey, Elon, why isn’t there a word on the SpaceX website about protecting travelers to mars from radiation?” I’m sure he has no clue, and maybe not even thinks it’s an important matter. Just send people unprotected and see what happens.

    Fortunately I don’t have time for such nonsense.

    2
  8. JohnSF says:

    And with predictable inevitability the sleeping killer bunny that lurks in the bunker beneath the Berlaymont begins to stir.
    Věra Jourová, Vice-President for Values and Transparency, EUCommission:

    News about arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying.
    EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights.
    This is reinforced under our #MediaFreedomAct.
    @elonmusk should be aware of that.
    There are red lines.
    And sanctions, soon.

    7
  9. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    The way I think about this; Twitter is a private sector communications company. As such, Musk is free to take it in the direction of Fox News/OAN/Newsmax if he so desires. I have no beef there. Fox is not required to carry WaPo reporters on their air, and Twitter isn’t either.
    The meta-danger here is that the right wing is, through words and actions, attempting to redefine the First Amendment in much the same way that they redefined and bastardized the Second Amendment.
    They have already succeeded in turning Religious Freedom on it’s head. Now they are on a mission to do the same with Free Speech.
    I wager, based on past performance, that they will be successful.

    3
  10. Chris says:

    If Musk could move up his time table to leave the planet, that would be great!

    1
  11. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    The journalism-adjacent writers of the “Twitter Files”, Taibbi and Weiss, look like real tools at this point.

    8
  12. EddieInCA says:

    I tweeted yesterday for the first time in a long long time. My tweet was simple.

    Test.
    Elon Musk is a piece of shit.
    That is all.

    I’m curious how far down the algorithm goes searching for critiques of Musk.

    4
  13. gVOR08 says:

    I enjoy laughing at Musk and I use Twitter directly only to the extent of following a handful of people. But I’ve been noticing lately how much of what I read originates in or is transmitted on Twitter. Several days ago Kevin Drum pointed out that only a tiny fraction of content on Twitter is political. The lefty blogs I enjoy depend on Twitter, as do many protest movements, official communications, and on and on.

    Case in point, Adam Silverman’s daily posts on the war in Ukraine at Balloon Juice which depends on Ukrainian government Twitter accounts, the tweets of expert commentators like Chuck Pfarrer, and much else. All this controversy is threatening something important.

    1
  14. Beth says:

    @JohnSF:

    I think that brings up an interesting issue. Can the EU punish a U.S. based entity for actions that entity takes against wholely U.S. based consumers/employees/entities simply because it has EU subsidiaries? I’m not talking about EU actions against Twitter for their EU based transgressions against EU employees/consumers. It just seems like this would be radically different and I doubt the EU wants the U.S. to do something similar to a more important company.

    I hope this makes sense.

  15. wr says:

    @daryl and his brother darryl: “The journalism-adjacent writers of the “Twitter Files”, Taibbi and Weiss, look like real tools at this point.”

    I understand that water is now wet, as well.

    4
  16. grumpy realist says:

    @Beth: Hey Beth! How’s the recovery going? Hope no problems….

    3
  17. MarkedMan says:

    Some random thoughts on this:
    – Musk is learning what everyone who has ever been trolled, hounded, harassed or worse on a social media site knows all too well: a poorly moderated and unresponsive system can enable toxic people to make your life hell. His solution, though, is to declare himself the supreme moderator and ensure that Twitter personnel responds to him in minutes, rather than contemplate what it means for the average Twitter user with no such access.
    – Musk is playing into the conservative stereotype: he can only empathize with himself and his closest circle, so if it happens to someone outside that circle he cannot put himself in their shoes.
    – If he continues to push out thought leaders and they go elsewhere, it will normalize their followers use of those alternate social media platforms. That’s how the transition from MySpace to Facebook happened.
    – Mastodon, in it’s current form, won’t be able to withstand the onslaught of new users. If it is to become the new Twitter, it will have to lose the bulk of what makes it unique. For example, there was a journalist-centric Mastodon server (I think I have this right) and it started out with just one person running it. When Mastodon started to take off but before Musk’s purchase of Twitter, it had reached the point where they had recruited a panel of nine other journalists to help them. But now that Mastodon has received so much attention the workload is overwhelming. The rules are noble, but a little nuanced. They have a bit of a “we know it when we see it” feel. One journalist accused another of breaking the rules and it turned into a whole thing, generating much discussion and angst and finally in the banning of both of the people involved. Bottom line, it took up an awful lot of the volunteers time. Pre-Musk, Twitter dealt with thousands of incidents like this every single day.

    2
  18. JohnSF says:

    @Beth:
    Good question, to which I have no answer.
    IANAL as the tag goes.
    But it will interesting to find out. 🙂
    I doubt Vera Jourova would just tweet this out without asking her legal team.
    The EU has in the past taken a very aggressive line with American tech companies, and made it plain it doesn’t much care about the US response.
    And in drawing up the DSA Act made it clear that, re. content control, it would be applied to companies making such content available in the EU from wherever.
    There are today lots of US media that are geoblocked in the EU due to GDPA compliance issues.
    I don’t know if any are yet re.DSA Act but it wouldn’t surprise me.

    1
  19. Stormy Dragon says:

    They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account

    The most disgusting part of this is that the “policy change” has a vaguely worded “newsworthiness” exception that’s an obvious excuse so that Elmo can continue to help target LGBTQ+ people with right wing violence because in Elmo’s mind only billionaires deserve privacy.

    2
  20. Stormy Dragon says:

    @MarkedMan:

    Mastodon, in it’s current form, won’t be able to withstand the onslaught of new users. If it is to become the new Twitter

    Mastodon is a protocol not a website. This is like saying HTTP won’t be able to withstand the onslaught of new users because the W3C consortium lacks the ability to review every single webpage on the internet.

    4
  21. DK says:

    @daryl and his brother darryl:

    The journalism-adjacent writers of the “Twitter Files”, Taibbi and Weiss, look like real tools at this point.

    “At this point” is doing a heavy lift here. In the immortal words of the late Denny Green: “They were who we thought they were.” #WeBeenKnew

    4
  22. DK says:

    Not to be confused with the Hunter Biden photos, which were pubic, but decidedly not public

    Ha. Professor Taylor got jokes.

    As I’ve said from the beginning of this era of phony whining and crying about free speech, wokeness, and cancel culture — the new right is only mad when straight white men are not the ones in control of the canceling.

    I’m sure Musk fanboy conservatives are ready to stop playing the victim and finally admit Twitter is a private company that has a right to set and enforce its own content standards — that banning accounts in violation of Twitter rules around hate speech and incitement to violence was not a 1st Amendment violation, the stupid lie Republicans have wasted our time with for the past few years.

    I’m sure Elon ‘Apartheid Clyde’ Musk will be transparent about Twitter’s new #1 rule: don’t hurt the fragile feewings of triggered rightwing snowflake, hypocrite, and fake free speech absolutist Elon Musk.

    6
  23. Chip Daniels says:

    Its been my experience that anyone who calls themself a “free speech absolutist” or words to that effect, is a closet reactionary.

    The reason being is that those words are a pose, not a real position that is to be defended.

    When pressed, they always admit to vast swaths of speech which can and should be suppressed by the government, like Libel/Slander, child pornography, state secrets, and time place and manner restrictions.
    In addition they also always admit to vast swaths of privately suppressed speech- places where bosses and landlords can rightfully punish certain types of speech.

    What the “free speech absolutist” position always seems to entail is the freedom of the holders of power to punish the speech the absolutist doesn’t like.

    6
  24. gVOR08 says:

    @Chip Daniels: Social obloquy has always been used to suppress speech outside societal norms. They’ve used it forever against LGBTQ, the left, and anyone considered outside the mainstream. These people don’t really understand, but nonetheless hate, that they are now on the outside.

    1
  25. gVOR08 says:

    More a freedom of association thing than speech, but very much free speech/association for me but not for thee. One Jason Willick, a conservative columnist, has a piece today in WAPO bemoaning that there’s a threat to unseat an Alaska state representative because he’s an avowed member of the Proud Boys and there’s a loyalty provision in the AK state constitution that bars from office any member of a group that advocates the violent overthrow of the U. S. government. Willick notes that the clause goes back to the Cold War and was demanded of AK as a condition of statehood because somehow there was a fear AK was a hot bed of communists. Maybe because some of them can see commies from their houses. He notes this history but seems oblivious to the hoist-on-petard irony of it.

    He also blandly notes the guy was elected to represent Wasilla with no apparent awareness of any context.

    1
  26. JohnSF says:

    Perhaps Mr Musk is contemplating the need for some really heavy-duty legal reps?
    Or perhaps that some co-investor might get a wee bit testy if they don’t get dollar on the day?
    Anyhoo:
    Elon Musk sells $3.6bn of shares in electric car maker Tesla
    “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

  27. MarkedMan says:

    @Stormy Dragon: Yeah, sure. And “Wiki” is a concept while “Wikipedia” is a specific implementation. But “wikis”, collectively, isn’t a searchable entity. Wikipedia is, and it couldn’t have become what it is had it remained a small group of volunteers. And similarly, if a specific Mastodon server eventually takes over Twitter or even a significant portion of it, it won’t be able to do so with a handful of volunteers as it does now. And that will fundamentally change it. It will become more like Twitter.

  28. JohnSF says:

    Eureka!
    It’s the missing letters and pronunciation!
    Elon “Free; Speechy; Absolutist” Musk

  29. de stijl says:

    I grew up around someone who evidenced / displayed manic behavior once or twice a month.

    I got very attuned to subtle signs and tells. You can judge a person’s status very clearly just by posture and overall body language.

    I learned how to become small and unnoticeable. I knew when to scoot to my bedroom and do homework or read. I learned how to dodge attention.

    Eventually, I learned how to stand up for myself.

    Musk is giving me very bad vibes. There is some weird shit going on with him. No one pays $44 billion dollars for a new toy and wrecks it immediately.