[mthoms]

>his commitment to uphold freedom of speech over profits

For your consideration, here's some evidence to the contrary. Twitter now agrees to 80% of censorship requests from various governments vs 50% previously.

>Twitter’s acquiescence to autocratic or non-liberal regimes is not an exaggeration by critics of the social network. [...] Since Musk’s takeover, the company has received 971 requests from governments (compared to only 338 in the six-month period from October 2021 to April 2022), fully acceding to 808 of them and partially acceding to 154. In the year prior to Musk taking control, Twitter agreed to 50% of such requests, in line with the compliance rate indicated in the company’s last transparency report (none have been published since October 2022). Following the change of ownership, that figure has risen to 83%, according to the analysis of the data by the technology information portal Rest of World.

Source: https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

[olalonde]

My understanding is that Elon's position is to defer to the law regarding speech. So it would make sense that censorship is increasing in some countries while decreasing in others. In the US, Twitter was previously censoring a lot of legal speech and I believe that's what mostly concerned him.

Edit: I perhaps used "free speech" a bit ambiguously in the previous comment. I edited it to "principles" to avoid causing more debate about semantics.

[mthoms]

It makes sense if he only cares about certain types of speech. Given he censors more overseas than previous Twitter leadership did (without getting banned) - it's really hard to argue he is motivated by principles rather than politics and money.

Furthermore, a person who is strongly principled on freedom of speech would not ban people he disagrees with. Yet, he's done that in spades. I mean come on. Can we just stop with this pretending?

[olalonde]

I can't say I have followed this enough to form a strong opinion, but let's say you are right, what would be an alternative motivation? Can we at least agree that this wasn't a decision driven purely by short-term profits? And can we agree that it was done at some personal cost? For example, his public image taking a big hit. Surely, Elon must have anticipated the impending backlash from both advertisers and mainstream media.

[mthoms]

We can certainly agree on that. I think the problem is that he's now motivated by ego above all else. Elon is... different.