[roughly]

I am not an Elon or X fan, and I don’t think this is Good, but Twitter’s policy pre-X to comply with national content laws was to geo-block content when a government demanded it be blocked. I don’t recall if the algorithmic shadow-ban was in that toolkit pre-X as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Again, I don’t think this is a good outcome, but it’s not substantially at odds with what Twitter pre-Elon would’ve done (I also seem to recall Twitter was very sensitive to employees visiting or living in Turkey - the relationship with the Turkish government had been fraught for years).

Now, if the critique here is that Mr. Free Speech is rolling over and showing his belly to the first autocrat who shows up at his door, yeah, I get that, but it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.

[panarky]

I happened to be in Istanbul during the Gezi Park uprising in 2013.

I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand.

They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising.

Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused.

Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.

After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils".

X’s own figures (as cited by Human Rights Watch) show 86% compliance with government requests from Turkey in 2024 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social...).

Compare that to pre-Musk times, where Twitter complied with Turkish court orders ~25% of the time (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURK...).

Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.

[drak0n1c]

Keep in mind that Pre-2016 Twitter was markedly looser in enforcement than 2016-2022 Twitter which was increasingly run by legal and moral busybodies sensitive to the fallout of the Arab Spring, and habituated to government pressure (see Twitter Files). If anything, Twitter under Musk is a continuation of that trajectory for Rest-Of-World, but with special exemptions and protections for English language countries and issues in which he and the firm has personal awareness of and popular capital - for example, see how it stands up to the governments of Brazil and UK.

[jrflowers]

> (see Twitter Files)

Can you clarify where in the Twitter Files it says that things were run by “legal and moral busybodies”? From what I recall the “Twitter Files” were just big dumps of innocuous records that rarely (if ever) contained any sort of narrative. The “story” of what they meant was entirely constructed by folks that pretty transparently set out with the intention of making Musk look good (eg Matt Taibbi)

[jamespo]

Personal awareness of, uh-huh

[postexitus]

All material facts are correct - but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore. In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise. Arab Spring gave people hope. Gezi people were not only protesting, but also enjoying their uprising, singing, dreaming. Today - all of that is gone. Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Let alone the number of active wars and conflicts developed countries are perpetrators...

[marcosdumay]

> but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore

Yep. In 2013 the social networks all found out that they can sell censorship to governments all over the world and their users wouldn't even notice it.

[eptcyka]

What is your argument exactly? The world is worse so we should be OK with that?

[marcosdumay]

Exactly that thing Twitter is doing now was one of the main contributors to the world getting worse. That they and all their other competitors have been doing since then.

Free-speech Twitter was either an accident or had a very quick change of mind. And either way, expecting centralized platforms to be of any use here is deeply misguided.

[matthewdgreen]

Free speech Twitter was the result of a company that had a single business: moving Tweets to people. Musk and Zuckerberg have many interests globally, and picking fights with governments doesn’t serve those interests. Don’t cheer when a billionaire with global business interests buys a (relatively) independent media property and claims he’s bringing “free speech” because (even if he wasn’t defining the term in a distorted way to benefit his interests) he literally could not do that in a meaningful way, he’s too entangled elsewhere.

[postexitus]

Counter argument is free-speech twitter created the world of today with unchecked distribution of conspiracy theories, hate speech and fear of other. I am not arguing for censorship, but it is factually wrong that it is censorship that brought us here. The world change before Twitter.

[postexitus]

That is not what happened. The world has changed for the worse and the social networks are the products of their time.

[BlueTemplar]

Egg and chicken ?

Anyway, that doesn't matter, what matters is that the people that are still using platforms are effectively collaborating with totalitarian extremists and should be shunned.

[FirmwareBurner]

> the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore

True. For better, but mostly for worse.

>In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise

Just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean authoritarian wasn't on the rise. By the time you see it it's already too late.

>Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism.

Because they discovered how powerful and important social media is, so they're seeking to control it more than they did in 2013 because leaders in 2013 didn't fully understand the internet.

And because most western democracies aren't true democracies where people have a voice in all matters that affect them, but function on the basis of controlled opposition, where there's two maximum three major parties pretending to oppose each other but all of which are coopted by the big-money establishment, making your vote irrelevant as no matter who you vote for, housing will still keep being more expensive, etc. even though you voted for the opposite thing to happen.

And if you vote for a fringe party or candidate that's not part of the establishment, and that candidate ends up getting enough traction to alter the elections, then that candidate will be eliminated from elections using selective enforcement of the law: see France, Romania, Germany, etc. Democrats tried to to the same to Trump to get him out of the 2024 presidential race with his mugshot everywhere, but failed. Not that Trump is not part of the establishment though.

[SilverElfin]

> Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.

I don’t think this is an accurate read. From the outside you don’t really know what they fought or didn’t fight, and why. It is possible Twitter/X chose not to fight certain situations based on prior experience or precedent. But in other cases, post-Musk, they have fought government censorship. For example they continued fighting the government of India even a year after Musk acquired Twitter/X. And they also had a showdown with Brazil’s government, where it was pretty blatantly violating Brazil’s own constitution.

[trelane]

> Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.

This is ironic on a posting discussing shadow bans.

[energy123]

Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies but turns a blind eye to every autocracy on the planet engaging in far more insidious censorship. Worse he will genuflect towards those autocrats. Interesting.

[SilverElfin]

“Elon” is not fighting something. He is implementing a policy. In countries where the law protects free speech, Twitter/X fights illegal orders that try to coerce them into censorship. That happens to be freer societies. But authoritarian ones that have very clear laws enabling censorship, they follow the local law. That’s not genuflecting but just sticking to a principled approach that avoids them being outright banned in those countries.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies

Care to share the sources that Elon fought those countries? Because the Wikipedia list of Twitter censorship shows that X complied with the majority requests from those countries.

[barbacoa]

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1811783320839008381

"""

The European Commission offered an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.

The other platforms accepted that deal.

X did not.

"""

[FireBeyond]

And as we all know, Elon is physically unable to lie. Of course there's no actual evidence for this "illegal secret deal".

-- sent from the front seat of my FSD-based unmanned Robotaxi

[FirmwareBurner]

So the EC are the bad guys masquerading as free speech loving democracy?

[beepbooptheory]

Well this was like a huge deal at the time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Twitter_in_Brazi...

I know 2024 was like a century ago though so its ok to have already forgotten! It's probably more notable event for Bluesky than Twitter at this point either way. But also either way: there is a clear contrast here with the OP article.

Either you are going out of your way to unban guys, or going out of your way to (effectively) ban them. I think its uncontroversial at the very least to note that he does seem to be making it incredibly hard to argue against the evidence of ideological commitment here, even if there are some 3D chess players out there who can maybe still see a "free speech" forest through the political trees.

[Quarrelsome]

Elon Musk stirred the pot in the UK during the summer riots of 2024 posting on twitter:

> civil war is inevitable

as the owner of a key media platform in the world that sort of statement is indefensible.

He's also picked a side in Germany by weighing in with as much support as possible for AfD.

Don't pick this as a hill to die on, that man isn't worth it.

[graemep]

I do not know about Germany, but I would characterise Elon's attempts to gain political influence in the UK as failed.

He tried to bribe one party to accept an extremist as a member in return for a huge bribe, and he failed.

He does not seem to have much influence on public opinion.

I do not think its accurate to say he was fighting countries either. He was trying to buy influence. Its not the same thing.

[Quarrelsome]

The man owns twitter ffs. The only way his attempts to gain political influence will ever fail is if the UK government block access to twitter or British people decide to stop using it. Until then he has significant capacity to sway political opinion.

As an example: there is significant power in cultivating the default UK experience of twitter for new accounts, which he's already had significant impact on by culling Twitter's internal moderation team. I've experienced it myself and its a an absolute disaster zone of disinformation and bot accounts trying to stoke internal divisions.

[graemep]

You would think so, but he seems to have had remarkably little impact so far.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Don't pick this as a hill to die on, that man isn't worth it.

What are you talking about? Are you making up strawmen?

[Quarrelsome]

Im saying he's not worthy of defending. Its clear that he intends to wield his fortune to enact political change.

[FirmwareBurner]

Pointing out the truth doesn't mean you're defending anyone but the truth. Not everything is partisan.

[arp242]

I guess the thing is that Musk does actually fight this sort of thing, but seemingly only on certain topics that align with his pretty far-out views.

It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff.

Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.

[shadowgovt]

I got off the bandwagon of old Twitter when they decided to respond to the US electing a Twitter troll President not by enforcing their own policy, but by modifying that policy to create a narrow carve-out of "newsworthiness" for a specific account that could then, more or less, disregard their policies wholesale.

New Twitter is worse, but the Twitter of the past had no real spine either.

[NewJazz]

Can you source this claim because Twitter turned a lot of heads when it didn't comply with content restrictions elsewhere in the Mediterranean and faced website blocks (that they retained Moxie to help circumvent)...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Ara...

[ayhanfuat]

It was indeed more selective before Elon https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...

[dmix]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Twitter

[bmelton]

Am I reading it correctly that there are no instances on that wikipedia after Elon's purchase (other than the Substack incident?)

[dmix]

This is definitely not the first time post-Elon that Twitter has continued the practice of following foreign requests. AFAIK they only pushed back on Brazil when what the government requested was particularly aggressive, not unlike when Facebook pushed back against Brazil back in the day and similarly got a daily fine for not following through.

[bananalychee]

Twitter regularly banned political figures globally following government pressure. X is more consistent in applying bans regionally rather than banning accounts from the platform entirely. Post-acquisition they've expressed that they choose to do that because they deem it to be preferable to having the entire network banned in certain countries. It probably has more to do with the financial incentives than with a value judgement, but either way there's no reasonable alternative, so I find it disingenuous to frame it as evidence of Musk's dishonesty, regardless of the fact that there are other instances where moderation policies were changed arbitrarily that actually do constitute evidence of that. I understand that some people flag any comment that isn't sufficiently critical of Musk and his companies regardless of their validity, which makes it tempting to parenthesize any "softball" comment to express loyalty to the tribe, but with regards to their compliance with government censorship it's unwarranted.

[numpad0]

imo the bigger talking point is that Twitter post-acquisition has been working pathetically to curb organic buzzes in favor of manufactured trends, even harder than its previous left-leaning management. Effect of that being observed in Turkish politics is a downstream issue to that.

Twitter's strict "fun wins" algorithm of past seem like it had been a major driver in e.g. Arab Spring.

[TRiG_Ireland]

The idea that a large company has ever "leaned left" in any real sense is a bit ridiculous.

[numpad0]

I would argue that Twitter pre-acquisiton had elements of inferiority-complex-driven-correct-isms and tryhard leftism. Not necessarily that I disagree with that biasing especially with what happened to it since. Their intents back then were 120% innocent, just occasionally un-ideal as nothing ever is perfect.

[mensetmanusman]

What is left? Your definition might be very different than the majority.

[BlueTemplar]

You should be wary in going there, unless you want to be beholden to the opinions of China + India.

[pessimizer]

Old Twitter was selective in what countries it would take orders from because it would consult with the administration on a weekly basis and be told what to do. Social media explicitly changed their policies to allow for the advocacy of violence against Russians (only), which is insane.

I have no idea how people could delude themselves into thinking that was a better situation, especially during a Trump presidency that has been deporting and excluding people for speech, but it's impossible to understand the movement Democrat's value system at any particular moment.

It's of course sad that we have to rely on Mr. Free Speech Oligarch in order to debate subjects from positions that consistently poll majorities of the electorate, but I'd rely on China, Russia and Iran to talk about my problems with the US government, too. They openly hate free speech, they just support the freedom of that sort of speech (until the US likes them again.) It's the US that is desperate to abandon what is almost literally its Prime Directive and main differentiator from the rest of the world. We are popularly sovereign. We are not ruled by God through His current anointed representative bloodline, with a Parliament as a customary intermediary (which is actually a frozen conflict.)

How many years are we away from a POTUS directly passing rule to their child or spouse? We've gotten awfully close multiple times in the past couple decades. Will Democrats finally be happy that dumb people don't get to vote anymore? Do we pass from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire again, propelled by the righteous complaints of slaves and farmers about a decadent, narcissistic, do-nothing elite?

[like_any_other]

> it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.

Not just at this point, and not just Twitter - slanting algorithms and bans for political ends is common practice, it's just usually a little more subtle:

Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-milita...

On Facebook, Comments About ‘Whites,’ ‘Men,’ And ‘Americans’ Will Face Less Moderation - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-face...

Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts - https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-...

Emi Palmor, the former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice is on Facebook's oversight board - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor

1993-1997 US secretary of Labor Robert Reich: Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms. Someone should remind him that they're private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. - https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296

Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy - https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-fa...

Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages - https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025

Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...

YouTube: Keeping Americans in the Dark on Islam - https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-am...

PPC candidate banned from Facebook and public debates - https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/143384506948066510...

Website critical of Joe Biden banned by reddit, and even banned from private messages on Facebook - https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_f...

Facebook Prevents Sharing New York Post Story on Black Lives Matter Founder Patrisse Cullors' Real Estate - https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-...

Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News - https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...

Reporter: Facebook using ex-CIA to decide misinformation policy is ‘very, very worrying’ - https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-e...

Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...

How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo