My hopes and dreams for Elon to make Twitter an unbiased platform that balances free speech and content moderation have been shattered. He is turning into a tyrant. Last night, Twitter suspended a number of prominent journalists without warning or explanation. Twitter also suspended Mastodon for no good reasons and suspended @ElonJet and @jxcksweeney who created ElonJet, citing the anti-doxxing policy although the flight tracking tweets are based on publicly available information.
It turns out Elon’s free speech is not the actual free speech but the speech he can put up with. For the speech that annoys him, he uses his absolute power at Twitter to silence people. Geez. What a shit show.
In addition to the unprincipled suspensions, Elon also created some hate speech himself. As shown below, he is in favor of Prosecute/Fauci. What???!!! I found this extremely distasteful. COVID-19 is a ginormous challenge. Sure, Dr Fauci and his team probably made some mistakes along the way but I do think they tried to make good decisions based on the information available and the political pressure they were under. I don’t believe Elon can do a much better job if he were in Dr Fauci’s position. Tweeting this is going to incite a lot of public anger or even violence toward Dr. Fauci.
Someone on the internet summarized the saga well: “Fragile Narcissist Buys Criticism Factory". He is turning into a tyrant by silencing his critics and competitors. I am really worried about Twitter under Elon’s erratic leadership. I had high hopes for Elon’s Twitter but I also knew the current state is a likely outcome if he couldn’t get over himself. It appears that sadly this worst case scenario is coming true.