[freedomben]

I don't agree after reading Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of Elon. It's deeply unfortunate that the book is already a few years old, I'd love and buy the hell out of a 2nd edition that is updated with the last few years.

Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.

[tim333]

Googling a little, he was a dem:

>Having reportedly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Musk even voiced his pro-Dems alignment in 2022 when he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he had “strongly supported Obama for President” in 2007.

I think he turned after Tesla was snubbed at Biden's 2021 EV summit because although it was the US's largest EV maker it wasn't unionized and Biden was in with the unions.

I can sort of see that being annoying.

[rjtavares]

He supports Trump now, so I really doubt free speech is important to him.

[blastro]

Free speech erosion under Biden... can you elaborate?

[hkpack]

Nothing productive will come out of this conversation.

[jcranmer]

There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the steps the government took to crack down on COVID misinformation, and some people are still upset about Twitter's decision to limit spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was entirely unilateral, and reversed within 24 hours).

Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.

[RickJWagner]

The number of media outlets that spiked the laptop story is shameful.

There really isn’t a good excuse.

[freedomben]

The administration put pressure on tech companies to make them censor people for "disinformation". For example:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerbe...

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

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

[alphabettsy]

Remind me who was president in 2020..

[freedomben]

Fair, that one wasn't a good example for this.

Though IMHO it's not just a Biden problem, it's a "everybody in power" problem. They just can't seem to resist (ab)using their power to shape the conversation and censor their opponents. It's also not new, it's been happening for hundreds of years at least. But it did get a lot more brazen under Biden IMHO with Twitter/Facebook etc and admin officials telling private companies what to censor (err, "moderate").

[greekrich92]

Damn it's really an infringement on our rights that they cracked down on people yelling "fire" in a crowded theater

[jcranmer]

This is your regularly mandated PSA that the quote about "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" comes from Schenck v US, which used that analogy to justify why the government could ban people from protesting the draft in WW1. It is not good law anymore, and has been fully superseded since the Brandenburg v Ohio case which limited the exemption to "imminent lawless action."

[greekrich92]

Oh well when you put it that way, I guess it's good that kids are dying of measles again.

[freedomben]

Read the links. It wasn't just that. People from the administration were actively talking with social media companies and telling them to take stuff down. At some points they even demanded it.

andy do you really think the Hunter Biden laptop story was equivalent or even close to "yelling fire in a crowded theatre"?

[vizzier]

twitters own lawyers argue against this reading in 2023, see page 11 onwards:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.38...

[Hikikomori]

They didn't. Fbi told Facebook etc to be on the lookout for Russia pushing stories to influence elections etc, they didn't ask them to do anything specific. Bidens campaign did ask Twitter to remove nudes of his son, which already broke Twitters own rules. This is why the twitterfiles were a nothing burger.