Free speech hating billionaire, Elon Musk, is now on a massive censorship rampage on Twitter. Journalists are now being mass banned.
It seems that Twitter owner, Elon Musk, is acting more and more like the Chinese government every day. Already, Musk began banning anyone who dare criticizes his decisions. This after proclaiming the platform to be a free speech network. Unfortunately, his version of free speech seems to be more of the right win version of free speech which is that it’s only valid speech if he agrees with it. Meanwhile, any speech that does not closely align with his personal beliefs will get banned, deleted, acid washed (whatever that means), cancelled, and silenced.
Recently, Musk has been on a massive censorship rampage on Twitter. Recently, Musk got the Twitter account @elonjet suspended for no real reason. From Techdirt:
Earlier this week, we wrote about how Elon Musk had secretly applied the strongest visibility filter (what some people insist on calling “shadowbanning”) to the ElonJet account on Twitter (which automatically noted where Elon’s private plane was flying), which he had promised not to ban due to his apparent “commitment to free speech.”
The guy behind ElonJet had revealed, based on a Twitter insider whistleblower that new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin had demanded the heaviest “visibility filter” be applied to ElonJet (VF stands for “visibility filter.”)
On Wednesday morning, despite all of this the @ElonJet account was suspended:
Later in the day, the guy behind it, Jack Sweeney, announced that all of his accounts, including his personal account had been banned as well:
Over on Mastodon, Sweeney shared the message Twitter sent him to explain why he was banned. It… seems like made up bullshit.
Unfortunately, it seems that this was only the beginning of this massive censorship spree. Shortly after, Musk banned the JoinMastodon account as well as flagging every Mastodon URL as potentially unsafe or blocking the posting of those URLs entirely. From TechDirt:
Oh, Elon. Following on yesterday’s nonsense in banning the ElonJet account that robotically posted the public information regarding Elon’s private plane flights, and then trying to justify it later (after initially promising to keep the account alive to demonstrate his “commitment to free speech”), it appears that Elon’s commitment to free speech continues to dwindle.
This afternoon it showed itself in the form of banning the @JoinMastodon account, which is the official account of the Mastodon federated, open source, social media network that has been growing by leaps and bounds, mostly from people exiting Twitter.
Its crime? From the Internet Archive, it appears that its last tweet was… to let people know that the @ElonJet account exists on Mastodon:
Since we are opposed to unjustified censorship, you can go to the Mastodon account of ElonJet here.
The censorship rampage then carried on thanks to the mass banning of high profile journalists as well:
Well. Just after finishing that last post about Twitter banning the official Mastodon account on Twitter for tweeting about the ElonJet tracking account existing on Mastodon, it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new “free speech absolutist” Twitter have really come off. In quick succession, a whole bunch of high profile reporter accounts were suspended, including Aaron Rupar (who famously covers and quotes videos of high profile politicians), Drew Harwell from the Washington Post, Ryan Mac from the NY Times, Donie Sullivan from CNN, and Matt Binder from Mashable.
It’s not entirely clear what “policy” these accounts violated. For all of Elon’s talk about transparency, there doesn’t seem to be very much here. A few of the accounts had talked about the ElonJet controversy but it’s not clear that they linked to it.
Update: The purge continues. Micah Lee, Tony Webster and Keith Olbermann are three more reporters now gone from Twitter.
So, despite Musk’s supposed commitment to free speech, it appears that his commitment to that is anything but. The mass banning of these accounts may be Mastodon’s gain as the option to join that alternative platform is certainly an option for many of these journalists. Still, it’s unclear if the censorship rampage will continue on the platform, but so far, it’s claimed the accounts of a number of people already. Nothing seems to be able to stop this massive censorship wave and it’s unclear if it is going to continue. We’ll keep monitoring the unfolding situation as things develop.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.