It turns out Musk’s free speech absolutism is less than absolute. In the end, Twitter was reinstated, its principles intact Erdogan was tainted by another autocratic move. Turkey did shut down Twitter for a while, but even some of Erdogan’s closest allies turned against him. I don’t care what the international community says.” Twitter fought back. In 2014, ahead of another election, Erdogan made similar demands, declaring, “We’ll eradicate Twitter. Musk maintained the choice was between accepting the government’s demands or letting them shut down Twitter. Faced against a juggernaut, the opposition was counting on social media platforms to carry its message. Many still admire him for reinstating thousands of Twitter accounts banned before he took over, even if racist and antisemitic posts exploded, as internet researchers have documented.īut while Musk claimed to be implementing his commitment to open Twitter’s gates to more free speech, it has increasingly appeared that he was opening them wide for those who agreed with his views – which more and more look like those of a far-right activist. It turns out that the commitment was less than rock solid.įree speech on Twitter was important for the opposition in Turkey’s election, because the government controls most of the media. And it seems he hasn’t given much thought to the corollaries, the consequences, of those ideas. But sometimes the beliefs seem only Tweet deep. Mike Blake/Reuters/FILEĮlon Musk claims George Soros ‘hates humanity.’ The ADL says Musk’s attacks ‘will embolden extremists’ SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk listens during a conversation with legendary game designer Todd Howard (not pictured) at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles, California, U.S., June 13, 2019. But most people took him at his word when he implied that what fueled his drive was his abiding concern for humanity.īack then, Musk profiles would gush shamelessly, describing his worries about the greatest risks to mankind, writing with visible awe that Musk, “navigates between running his businesses and trying to save the planet.” Sure, he was already running roughshod over the rules back then, and many were starting to question the hero worship. He also slandered a respected international investigative journalism organization, and argued that it is, “bullsh*t” to think that a massacre allegedly carried out by a man with Nazi tattoos and a vast track record of racist, antisemitic and misogynistic posts means the incident is linked to white supremacy. Then the day after the election, Musk launched a Twitter assault on George Soros (more on that in a moment), the Jewish billionaire supporter of liberal causes, framing his criticism of the Holocaust survivor in terms that made scholars of antisemitism warn that Musk’s messaging would worsen the growing plague of antisemitic and racist violence. It’s hard to square the man who regularly promotes wild conspiracy theories to his tens of millions of followers with the supposedly thoughtful visionary of his pre-Twitter days. He’s literally bowing down to dictatorship.” (Twitter said it took the action “in order to keep Twitter available over the election weekend.” It added that of five Turkish court orders issued against it, it had objected to four.) Twitter complied with the Turkish court orders just in time to possibly boost the chances of Erdogan – the president who has imprisoned journalists, critics and rivals – as he faced one of the toughest elections of his life.Īppalled, Enes Kanter Freedom, the Turkish-born former NBA player, a fierce critic of Erdogan, told CNN, “I don’t want to hear about Elon Musk talking about free speech ever again. Over the weekend, Musk – whose claim that he is a “free speech absolutist” has already appeared self-serving in the past – surrendered to demands from the increasingly authoritarian government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, blocking some accounts and more than 400 tweets in the country. But even those of us who make it a point to ignore his regular trolling find it necessary to note just how harmful and hypocritical the former world’s wealthiest man truly is. Musk craves the attention, so one hesitates to feed him precisely what he wants. Just in the past week, Musk has behaved in ways that cause potentially far-reaching harm, while shedding more light on the contradiction between his public pronouncements and his actions.
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