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by smelly101 934 days ago
Can you go into more detail?

He pays for peoples legal funds who have issues with free speech on twitter no matter if he agrees or not.

2 comments

>He pays for peoples legal funds who have issues with free speech on twitter no matter if he agrees or not.

No he does not.

Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk. [1]

Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.

These countries include China [2] and India [3].

[1] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/twitte...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...

The twitter files showed that, previously, some of the compliance was side channel, which makes the previous compliance rate suspect.

edit: is this not accepted fact, at this point?

This is a good point. They were literally doing the NSA's/CIA/FBI??? bidding at one point.
Musk has explicitly and repeatedly said that his standard for free speech is that which complies with the law in any given country. The logic is that domestic laws represent the will of their citizens and it shouldn't be a corporation's (or a billionaire's) responsibility to second guess this.

Quote — "By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people." [0]

Quote — "Like I said, my preference is to hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates. If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed." [1]

Personally I think this the only sane stance for a corporation like Twitter/X. We shouldn't be looking to capitalist non-democratic corporations as an end-run around governments — especially democratic governments.

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376?lang...

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1523654106745020418?lang...

> Musk has explicitly and repeatedly said that his standard for free speech is that which complies with the law in any given country.

Yet he has repeatedly demonstrated that this is not, in fact, his standard for free speech. It’s bizarre to pretend that it is.