Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

> In India, he agreed with an order imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take down accounts and posts related to a farmers’ protest that swept through the country in February, their demands including guaranteed prices for their produce and debt waivers.

(https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/31/brazil-moves-to-blo...)

And there are outside actors currently working hard to ensure that this happens, because they want a return to the old imperial world order (where powerful nations capture territory and expand, and weaker nations die at their hands and are colonized).

If you are in the U.S I am sorry you have this take on free speech, because it is distorted.

Free speech is defined by law and the law is clear. Freedom of speech means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government.

Musk isn't hard right. There is a lot of overlap positions between him and Bill Clinton (the original one from the 1990s, I do not know what he says now), except that Musk is anti-war and obviously talks like he was on Usenet.

I can't understand that software engineers, who vigorously defended free speech and also the somewhat trollish communication style up to at least 2010, came to be assimilated and reprogrammed by their employers.

Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.

Russia purportedly supports free speech right wing groups, though I think the problem is vastly overstated in order to discredit them. Most of this is organic,too.

Whatever is the case, left or right, we cannot let our own beliefs be dictated by whatever Russia supports or co-opts at any given time. Similarly, vegetarians should not abolish their beliefs just because a notorious 20th century dictator was also a vegetarian.

It's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight what was a mistake and what was not. Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been. The question, of course, is WHAT needs to be censored, HOW MUCH it needs to be censored, HOW it should be censored, and WHO decides.

In the old days, it was easy: If it wasn't on prime time (TV, major newspapers, syndicated radio), it didn't exist. And this cabal served us well, providing a small number of voices to tell people who they were and what to believe.

Now with a potentially unlimited number of voices going up and down in popularity with unprecedented speed and across nations, we're headed into unknown territory, so there are going to be a lot of mistakes, and nobody can know for sure if our nations can even survive it.

Obviously for people whose idea of freedom of speech begins and ends at actively promoting vice signalling in regimes which have some degree of speech protection whilst doing exactly what an autocrat like Erdogan asks because "you can't go beyond the laws of a country", Musk represents an improvement, but that doesn't have anything to do with promoting First Amendment ideology overseas.

Musk is not perfect by any means wrt free speech.

His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-censors-twitter-in...

And he regularly bans journalists who don’t lick his boots.

https://newrepublic.com/post/177936/twitter-suspends-account...

Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.

> He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms.

This is particularly absurd. “The first amendment” isn’t a paragon of freedom unique to the US. And it only applies to government censorship. You can’t “export it” to other countries by means of a social network.

For me, Musk/Trump is indeed fresh trollish air in all this seriousness and iam astounded, that no one else enjoys it. But i also have the feeling, it is a last breath before police state takes over. Because a state can not allow its citizen to go rogue.

So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction to what the other tribe have been doing for ages?

He didn't fundamentally change Twitter. He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.

(I suppose he's also using it as his own personal megaphone, whereas the previous owners would merely ensure that chosen voices were amplified/suppressed rather than using their own voices directly)

Not sure how we start to approach some sort of disarmament process when it comes to these propaganda weapons, though.

No. There are very few things that 'need to be censored' by the government (or corporations with almost government-level power), and it's hard to think of any beyond CSAM or legitimate threats to national security.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things that children should be protected from. But we're failing miserably at that. They're watching extreme porn and gore while the censors are focusing on silencing adults with the wrong political views.

I am paying attention to what he does. I use Twitter for hours every day.

The point is less about "free speech", because of course you're right, this is Musk's version of free speech.

But the real issue to the left is that he's allowing speech that, in recent history, has been considered "dissenting" or restricted. The fact that in the past week we have had Zuck come out and say Facebook was pressured to censor COVID19 materials and that we have mainstream politicians and bureaucrats calling to THROW MUSK IN JAIL is insane. Utterly insane.

The people behind this are getting found out, and there will be political consequences.

But giving the "other team" a voice (my team, in some ways) is valuable, and we aren't going to give it up easily.

And please, don't point to the fact that there are right-wing loons on Twitter, because there are crazies from all sides all over the internet.

> He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.

I'd say not. I don't think twitter itself wasn't aimed directly in any direction before Musk, other than “away from where firing may cause twitter problems”. They operated from a position of cowardice rather than political bias.

Sometimes this was towards the right because there was a fairly centrist or centre-left¹ bias online, but it often very much wasn't. For a clear case of them not aiming at the right, look at them leaving Trump and many like him alone at a time when they were flagrantly going against twitter policies, but slapping them for that would have caused too much grief back at them. It may be a complete coincidence², but Musk first started getting really serious about taking over around the time twitter started cracking down on that group (having joked about it prior to that IIRC, though it did take over a full year for his first actual takeover bid to happen).

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[1] These definitions are difficult. Often what America seems to see as centre-left or even actually moderate left, is things that many over this side of the big pond would see as more centrist.

[2] Though I strongly suspect not.

Sure, I get that. Just stop pretending that it's about principle, then!

I'll caveat this by saying I've never had a twitter account or any desire for one¹ meaning my views are those of an outsider and occasionally a passive reader – but from what I can see twitter acted from a position of cowardice² rather than any political machinations.

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[0] One man's fair slapping of an arsehole, is another man's unfair restriction of speech.

[1] At first it was a daft novelty, then a novelty that had perhaps outstayed its welcome, then just a place far too full of people who thought twitter was a good idea, then the famous got hold of it and it became a tribal shit-show & soon after a political shit-show – all before Musk jumped in with both feet and a lot of other people's money.

[2] Hence not kicking Trump (and a few others close to him or relevant rhetoric) despite flagrant breaches of their stated policies, until such time as he was a lesser threat due to not getting a second term, and before that kicking people not because of any internal moral code but because of what advertisers might think.