X Purges Prominent Journalists, Leftists With No Explanation

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Politics@beehaw.org – 90 points –
X Purges Prominent Journalists, Leftists With No Explanation
vice.com
16

I'm starting to think maybe Elon isn't the 'free speech absolutist' he claimed to be.

You might have a point there. Maybe... just maybe... this Musk fellow is completely full of shit about most things he says.

Unless he's talking about rockets, I've stopped listening.

A compulsive liar will lie about anything, stop listening entirely

It's hard to lie about physics. He can lie about his schedules, or how he treats his employees, but not about thermodynamics. When he's talking about rockets, he's historically been fine. This is a good example: https://youtu.be/SA8ZBJWo73E?t=760

Lol @ thinking Musk has even a basic grasp on the physics that his employees work with. I bet you think he "invented Tesla" too.

I think this explanation would be more coherent if it was given by one of SpaceX's competent and underpaid engineers. They clearly did a good job of dumbing it down to Elon's level of comprehension, so that he could sluggishly regurgitate it to the general public and appear to understand rocket science.

Oh sure, he's an absolutist: Free speech for him and people he likes? Absolutely. Free speech for people he doesn't like? Absolutely not.

Fortunately, Musk walked it back(for now):

UPDATE 1/9/24: Hours after reporting out this initial story, some of the suspended X accounts returned. X has not explained what happened and the affected account owners have no idea why they were briefly suspended. The reinstatement came after notable users such as George Galloway, a former member of the British Parliament, called out Musk for banning the accounts.

Of course, anyone who's still on there should consider leaving... he's going to continue to pull this shit, and the more people that interact with the platform, the more legitimized it is.

Is it fortunate? It'd be better to press the issue and have all serious media abandon Twitter for good. Now it will keep simmering for longer. Why keep up the pretense?

George Galloway was on Big Brother, so he must not really mind the surveillance and abuse.

Don't worry everyone, this was absolutely an accident; they weren't supposed to be purged, they were just supposed to be moved to a group where their tweets are de-prioritized and hidden from most people! Someone just included the wrong settings on the group object. /s

So this is what "free speech absolutism" looks like, eh?

It's free speech Jim, just not as we know it.