When he first toyed with the idea of buying Twitter, Elon Musk vowed to make it a haven for unbridled free speech. He promised to reinstate accounts that had been banned, including the one belonging to Donald Trump. Soon after the deal first went through in October, he tweeted, “Comedy is now legal on Twitter.” And so freedom flew on Twitter…unless you’re in Turkey.
Over the weekend, it was revealed that Musk had bowed to requests from Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s incumbent president, who’s facing a tough battle to hold onto his seat. The Erdogan administration is infamously restrictive and undemocratic, to the point that they demanded Musk censor tweets from his opponents or face the whole service being blocked in the nation. So the free speech absolutist censored free speech.
It takes less than two seconds to see that Musk’s framework — I’m a free speech absolutist … unless anybody threatens to shut off Twitter access, in which case, I’m for or against whatever they want — is laughably unworkable pic.twitter.com/1ZdzR4hE0g
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) May 13, 2023
When called out on it by journalist Matthew Iglesias, Musk stood his ground. “Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” he replied.
Musk was roundly condemned for backing down on his alleged principles.
Whew, good thing Twitter is about free speech absolutism https://t.co/7tGQymNAlh
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 13, 2023
If you want to buy the platform to help right wing governments around the world, just say it with your chest. It’s your money, go for it, but spare us the free speech BS.
Old twitter rejected 50% of these demands, which isn’t perfect. New Twitter complies 100%.
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) May 13, 2023
this whole Twitter free speech thing is going just as you might expect https://t.co/QHh7u63nfT
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 13, 2023
The founder of Wikipedia even stepped in to let Musk know how they’ve handled such attacks.
What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought to the Supreme Court of Turkey and won. This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan. https://t.co/tHkx1Wa06r
— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) May 13, 2023
Some pointed out that this has happened with Erdogan before — and Twitter did not comply.
Twitter used to routinely challenge Turkey’s takedown requests
Erdogan actually had Twitter banned in Turkey in 2014 for refusing to comply. (the courts later ended the ban.)
but that was on the “censorship” version of Twitter, not this new “free speech” one https://t.co/z1fO9JfkpU
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) May 13, 2023
Old Twitter, for all its many faults, refused to comply with more than 50% of government removal requests. You comply with 100% of them – why is that? https://t.co/qKdhCjwWKq
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 13, 2023
Perhaps Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s original honcho, is feeling even more remorse than he already did.
(Via Mediaite)