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by mathaway 1265 days ago
Wait until you find out Henry Ford’s politics. Or Volkswagon’s history. Although obviously it’s not as bad as a man promoting free speech and criticizing postmodernism.
7 comments

Sure, plenty of other carmakers have committed vile sins. But the Musk Twitter nonsense is very current, which makes it harder to stomach than Henry Ford's anti-semitism over 100 years ago.

And let's not pretend Elon is sticking up for "free speech." He's censoring folks who don't agree with him. That isn't free speech, unless you subscribe to fascist definitions of "free speech."

the Musk Twitter nonsense is very current

I don't understand how people don't get this?

It's like saying "Trump's bad, but what about Thomas Jefferson and slavery!"

It just leaves people scratching their heads.

There is no one currently banned on Twitter by Musk for personal dislike. The only person he’s being unprincipled against is Alex Jones.
Surely there's no difference between people who have been dead for decades and someone who chooses every day to actively put himself in the spotlight by doing stuff ranging from stupid to awful.

Really sad fall from grace for Elon. Could've just kept working.

I mean, I think you’ll find that Henry Ford is dead.

In general, “past, extremely dead, person was awful; this excuses the current awful person” is _not_ a great argument. It also seems to be a fairly new invention; I’ve only really seen it in the last decade.

Not even going to address the free speech thing, except to say that you must be using a very 1984 “war is peace” sort of definition there…

It's not just his politics.

He's running Twitter in a very erratic manner and demonstrating very poor judgement. It's completely reasonable not to trust someone like that with your family's safety.

He is banning people sometimes for policies he introduced after the fact, sometimes without policy violations at all. “Free speech” is just not a defendable position for his behavior, he does not subscribe or support free speech.
Twitter moderation was famously bad before Elon, and has seemingly only slightly improved.

What Elon has done however is put the spotlight on Twitter, almost every issue people have with it is a “preexisting condition”.

Except he banned a bunch of journalists discussing him using a policy he introduced after the fact, and in one case, without violation at all. His active actions, not pre-existing conditions, reveal his preference against free speech.
Who is banned from Twitter now that Musk banned? The lunatics that ran it for years banned people wantonly with vague reasons without any remedy for 5+ years in some cases.

Musk revealed files implicating the FBI, CIA and Pentagon but oh my God he voted Republican so he’s evil!

Is he promoting free speech? Last I heard he had deleted a load of journalists accounts, before that it was deleting parady accounts. What concrete thing has he done for free speech other than offer trump his account back?
How many decades ago are we talking about?