> There is some irony now seeing those that didn't believe the banning of accounts arbitrarily was an issue under previous management decrying this move by Elon.
No, the irony is not that the site under both owners is trying to remove bad/harmful content (just defining it differently).
The irony is that Musk thought he wasn’t going to have to do it at all: “absolute free speech”, “public square”, “comedy is legal”, etc.
One of the banned journalists went on Mastodon and said (paraphrasing): “It’s his site and he can ban whoever he wants”
And to be fair, under both owners, accounts were banned for violating ToS policies. The policies are just different, but they’re still the rules you agree to when you use the site.
I just don’t think anyone thought “free speech” meant no parodying, no republishing public FAA info, etc.
Many journalists are singularly obsessed with the eradication of 'harmful' or 'unsafe' accounts from Twitter. They are particularly concerned about doxxing when it happens to political figures they're sympathetic to or journalists. Technically all home addresses are public information, just as FAA data is. Yet people get rather nervous when their home address ends up on the internet and rightly so.
Their entire argument is about the prevention of the exact sort of thing that Musk alleges happened to a car carrying his child - real world harm from online activity. So why exactly are they upset about this change in policy that while clearly motivated by self-interest rather than any principle, technically aligns with some of their goals? It's because they want to be able to doxx people they think deserve it. Because when they doxx it's journalism, but when their enemies doxx it's stochastic terrorism.
No, the irony is not that the site under both owners is trying to remove bad/harmful content (just defining it differently).
The irony is that Musk thought he wasn’t going to have to do it at all: “absolute free speech”, “public square”, “comedy is legal”, etc.
One of the banned journalists went on Mastodon and said (paraphrasing): “It’s his site and he can ban whoever he wants”
And to be fair, under both owners, accounts were banned for violating ToS policies. The policies are just different, but they’re still the rules you agree to when you use the site.
I just don’t think anyone thought “free speech” meant no parodying, no republishing public FAA info, etc.