Elon vs Twitter update: Elon helped America win , Tesla stock through the roof

So ban a right-wing account and it's a violation of free speech, but ban a left wing account and they can start their own Twitter?

 

The guy had like 150k followers.

 

Absolutely - this is how it was always going to be. He has the emotional maturity of a child - he's literally transformed into Trump. Free speech may or may not have been an interest at some point in his past, but it certainly hasn't been since the whole Twitter thing came up. He bought it because he got pissy that they banned an account he liked (and accidentally signed an agreement while throwing a tantrum). That's it.

 

No, it's only a violation of free speech when the government is involved in getting the account banned.

The constitution protects you from the government, not from private companies (unless the government colludes with the private company, which is exactly what has been happening).

 

LOL @Major once again trying to tell us how "it was always going to be". According to @Major, Musk was never going to buy Twitter.

Oops.

 

He's been doing it for years - he tracks like 100 or so private jets of different people. He just has a bot that re-posts information from public flight registries. I'd have no problem if Elon had some set of rules that made it not allowed - but he doesn't. And he specifically said he was committed to allowing that guy to continue. Until he changed his mind and randomly sued him for ***** and giggles, I guess (he won't win).

 

Yep. He's just throwing a Trumper Tantrum

 

Now he he us posting a video of the guy and the license plate. Against his own ToS

 

I realize the license plate is public, but the video of the person is without their consent.

 

He felt that he or his family were endangered by it. Seems an understandable thing to change one’s mind on.

I’m not sure how this rule will be applied. If I’m in a restaurant and a famous person is dining there, am I not allowed to tweet that the famous person is there in real time?

What if it was a scheduled public appearance? Surely tweeting about that is permitted.

 

The guy tweets public jet information. Elon freaked out because someone was stalking a car, which has nothing to do with jet guy.

But sure - you're right. His rules are basically made up in real time and retroactively based on whatever affects him personally. So as long as you're doing terrible things but they don't bother him, he's fine with it. It's exactly the type of stuff he complained Twitter was doing and he needed to save it from with transparent rules/etc. And as noted above, he was happy to do the exact same thing to that car driver.

 

Then why is there all this brouhaha from the right about Twitter and Free Speech the past few years. The gov't isn't the one banning accounts...its Twitter.

 

Yeah I think it's really bad for him to make Twitter about him and his fans at least from a political perspective. banning left wing voices and those critical of him - which is now being celebrated by the right as free speech and that it's ok since it's the left being banned - is just going to kill twitter.

You can't create a platform that serves just one group of people - truth social proved this out. Ultimately it just means something new will come along that will replace Twitter as Twitter becomes the new Truth Social. It's pretty short sighted.

 

Have you been under a rock?

 

No I just look at the facts and not the spin from the right wing media

 

If a local police department contacts a store or some business to look out for something that is "colluding"?

Here. How about this. Explain the mechanism that the US government utilized to enforce Twitter to suppress speech. Provide the actual mechanism. Tell me the consequences if they don't follow the government. Provide evidence outside of speculation.

 

https://media4.manhattan-institute....-changizi-v-dept-of-health-human-services.pdf

 

Also, the legal argument is made in possibly easier to understand terms here (even before Elon Musk unveiled a lot more evidence of government collusion with Twitter (which is undoubtedly happening with other social media platforms as well)).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitte...saki-murthy-section-230-antitrust-11660732095

Twitter Becomes a Tool of Government Censorship
Alex Berenson was kicked off the site at the White House’s urging. That’s a violation of the First Amendment.

By Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld
Aug. 17, 2022 1:47 pm ET


Alex Berenson is back on Twitter after being banned for nearly a year over Covid-19 “misinformation.” Last week the former New York Times reporter settled his lawsuit against the social-media company, which admitted error and restored his account. “The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter,” Mr. Berenson wrote last week on Substack. But because the Biden administration brought pressure to bear on Twitter, he believes he has a case that his constitutional rights were violated. He’s right.

In January 2021 we argued on these pages that tech companies should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines when they censor constitutionally protected speech in response to governmental threats and inducements. The Biden administration appears to have taken our warning calls as a how-to guide for effectuating political censorship through the private sector. And it’s worse than we feared.

OPINION: FREE EXPRESSION
The Left's Suppression of Speech


36:02
Facts that Mr. Berenson unearthed through the discovery process confirm that the administration has been secretly asking social-media companies to shut down the accounts of specific prominent critics of administration policy.

On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked President Biden: “On Covid misinformation, what’s your message to platforms like Facebook.” Mr. Biden replied: “They’re killing people.” (The president later said he meant users were killing people.) Later that day, Twitter locked Mr. Berenson’s account, and on Aug. 28 it banned him permanently.

Last Friday Mr. Berenson published conversations from an internal Twitter Slack channel. Referring to an April 2021 meeting with White House officials, one Twitter employee noted that the meeting overall was “pretty good,” but added that the White House “had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”

Another employee asked: “Any high level takeaways from the meeting? Anything we should keep an eye out for?”

The first employee responded: “Yes, they really wanted to know about Alex Berenson.” The employee wrote that Andy Slavitt, then a senior White House Covid adviser, “suggested they had seen data viz that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.” (“Viz” probably stands for “visualization” and “disinfo” for “disinformation.”)

Mr. Berenson wasn’t the only target. At a July 15, 2021, White House press briefing with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, press secretary Jen Psaki said: “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. . . . There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of antivaccine misinformation on social media platforms.” This was a reference to the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” 12 named individuals identified in a report by the U.K.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate—a report that Facebook disputed even as it said it had taken action against its targets. Ms. Psaki went on to say of the 12 that “all of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including . . . ones that Facebook owns.” That might have been a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccination, who had been deplatformed by Facebook-owned Instagram.


At the same briefing, Dr. Murthy called on social-media companies to purge more Covid posts: “We’re asking them to consistently take action against misinformation superspreaders on their platforms.” At a briefing the next day, again possibly referring to Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Psaki said that if you post misinformation, “you shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”

Recent Freedom of Information Act disclosures show that a week later, on July 23, 2021, Nick Clegg—a former U.K. deputy prime minister and now Facebook parent Meta’s president for global affairs—emailed Dr. Murthy to thank him for meeting with Facebook and to report on “the steps we took just this past week” to “further address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to the ‘disinfo dozen’ . . . resulting in every member . . . having had at least one such entity removed.” He added that Facebook was “continuing to make 4 other Pages and Profiles, which have not yet met their removal thresholds, more difficult to find on our platform.”

This goes even beyond what was happening when we wrote the week before Mr. Biden’s inauguration. At that time, lawmakers had repeatedly threatened tech companies with catastrophic consequences if they didn’t more aggressively censor speech the government disfavors. Congress had immunized these companies from liability if they remove “objectionable” but “constitutionally protected” content, to quote Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

In response to these and other inducements and threats, social-media companies were already suppressing speech about Covid that was well within the bounds of legitimate debate and sometimes proved accurate. Facebook had banned anyone from saying that Covid might have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, or that the Covid vaccines didn’t prevent infection.

When the government exploits these legislative inducements to target specific critics for censorship, it has crossed a constitutional Rubicon. Targeting, punishing and silencing dissenters is the paradigmatic First Amendment violation. The Biden administration is using Big Tech as its private censorship arm, and that violates what the Supreme Court, in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), called an “axiomatic” principle: The government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

The administration’s behind-the-scenes use of social-media companies to evade the First Amendment seems to be continuing unabated. In April this year Ms. Psaki, who was still the White House press secretary, said: “We engage regularly with all social media platforms about steps that can be taken . . . and I’m sure that will continue. But there are also reforms we think Congress could take and we would support taking, including reforming Section 230 [and] enacting antitrust reforms.” The unexplained pivot to “antitrust reform” here is telling: Censor the “problematic” posts and people we identify, Ms. Psaki implies, or we may break you up under the antitrust laws.

This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. If in November 2020 President Trump and Republican lawmakers had used threats and private communications with tech companies to remove what they considered “misinformation” about election results, Democrats would have instantly and rightly identified a threat to democracy.

Democracy depends on free and open debate. If government officials continue to deputize private companies to stifle dissenters, it’s high time for federal courts to deliver them a reminder: If it’s state action in disguise, the Constitution applies.

Mr. Ramaswamy is executive chairman of Strive Asset Management and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam” and “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” forthcoming in September. Mr. Rubenfeld is a professor at Yale Law School and a First Amendment lawyer. His clients include Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Appeared in the August 18, 2022, print edition as 'Twitter Becomes a Tool of Government Censors'.

 

Yawn…. Print media had editors who would decide what to publish based off of standards.

Again…. The WSJ decided not to publish the Hunter Biden story initially. It went against their standards.

 

Why do les ATW keep on posting stuff about Facebook banning "lab leak theory". And in this sense "theory" is the colloquial version of the term.

The people who got suspended or had their content removed were people who made matter of fact claims that it's confirmed AND they go a step farther and claim it's intentional.


And for the love of God just copy and paste the title and at most the lead paragraph of an article and provide the link.