Masnick’s writing has never struck me as inflammatory or rushed. If he’s using this language, we should all be worried.

C’est du n’importe quoi, ça. Quelle honte, ce pays.

Yet more to demonstrate that “free speech” often means “right-wing speech.”

Moderating employees but not users seems telling to me.

Bookmarking as yet another example of Elon Musk’s free speech reputation being undeserved.

I. With Siblings in a Sibling-Only Chat Separate from the One with Parents and Partners We process the news together (I’m not the one to start the conversation but glad for the sibling who did). It’s not a deep processing, but I’m not sure we would have done this much even a few years ago. We plan to send flowers to the widow, decide who’s going to write the note, and settle up over Venmo.

This is one of these stories where I’ve been waiting to get Masnick’s take on it, and he does not disappoint.

I’ve only skimmed this so far, but while I firmly believe that the fetishizing of freedom of expression is causing real issues in our world, I appreciate Masnick’s critique. I expect I’ll always be more keen on regulation than he is, but that doesn’t make him wrong in the points he’s making here.

Look, it’s hard to oppose legislation that purports to be “for the kids,” but with the EFF, Mike Masnick, and other voices I respect still firmly against this, I’ll be calling my reps—and encouraging others to do the same.

Masnick’s perspectives on free speech are always helpful.

Masnick’s frustration here is fun to read.

There’s so much inane blathering about free speech on the internet that it’s easy to sometimes forget that it can be a real concern. Here’s one such example.

It appears that Musk’s “free speech absolutism” continues to be selective and self-serving.

I get that it’s straightforward language that everyone will get, but I think “uncensored” is the wrong word here. Content moderation is not (necessarily) censorship, and content moderation is good and helpful for tools like generative AI.

Bellingcat does good work; Twitter continues to be a joke.

I know I can always count on Masnick to write this article when a story like this comes up.

How does this acquisition continue to get dumber and dumber?

Free speech is genuinely important, but it’s hard to take the ideal seriously when its advocates twist it to mean something specific and self-serving.

I mean, I’m willing to wait a bit and see what Twitter and Musk have to say about this, but this sure doesn’t seem like the approach that a free speech absolutist would take.

How does such an already bad story get so much worse over the course of a single day?

I haven’t been following Ken White as much as I used to, but this reminds me why I appreciate his perspective. This is someone who knows what free speech is and advocates for it, not someone who uses it as a buzzword justification for reprehensible behavior, à la Musk.

They’re so obvious as to almost not be worth pointing out, but two points: First, this is why making verification a paid feature is dumb; and second, penalizing parody because your business model is dumb is not what free speech absolutism looks like.

Choosing not to do business with someone isn’t an assault on free speech—it’s the very definition of the marketplace of ideas.

Interesting read here from Masnick. I’m not familiar with everything he writes about here, but I always appreciate his perspective.

We need to do more work to divorce free speech from content moderation. The world without content moderation would be a much worse world, and we don’t want to live in it. Sure, social media platforms are too powerful, but this is not the answer.

Here’s the EFF pointing out that “free speech” on these platforms means something very particular rather than a broad, deep commitment to legally-protected expression.

It’s funny how conditional the GOP’s concerns about free speech are. That’s not to say that free speech isn’t a complicated topic to be weighed in conjunction with other concerns—it absolutely is. But if a party wants to use a simplistic view of free speech as a rallying cry, stunts like this show how just how simplistic that view is.

This is a peak example of what performative concerns about “free speech” boil down to.

Content moderation is a good thing, and ‘free speech’ should not be our primary concern when it comes to social media platforms.

Last week, I was interviewed by a reporter at WEKU about social media and content moderation in the context of the horrific recent shooting in Buffalo, and I was pleased to see the interview appear on the WEKU website this morning. I wish that the headline didn’t frame this as a question of “free speech”—and that I’d perhaps been more forceful in emphasizing that these really aren’t questions of free speech so much as content moderation.

Say it together now: Content moderation and free speech are different things.

The quotes in here underline how often ‘free speech’ is used to mean ‘problematic right-wing talking points.’

EFF cares about and actually understands free speech and content moderation, so their voice is especially important today.

I have only been reading Techdirt for a short amount of time, but I increasingly appreciate Masnick’s perspectives on issues like this.

Content moderation is a necessity, and Musk’s take here is wildly irresponsible.

Please be skeptical of anyone who describes platform content moderation as censorship.