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.