Turns Out, Free Speech on the Internet is Hard
Analyzing Elon Musk’s latest bizarre moves with Twitter.
Last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk made a series of moves that seemed to contradict his previous statements surrounding free speech.
First, he suspended a Twitter account that tracked his private jet, information that is public on various plane tracking websites. He justified this by calling it “doxxing” and declared that posting real time locations on anyone would be considered as such and would also result in suspensions.
Doxxing is defined as the sharing of non-public, private or personal information on the internet with malicious intent. Typically, this involves posting someone’s home address or phone number with the intent of having people harass the subject. Musk cited a now verified instance of a stalker to justify his position on real time flight tracking, even though the Los Angeles Police Department found no link between flight tracking and the stalking incident.
Then he went further and suspended a series of journalists who even covered the story and posted links to public jet tracking websites.
By today, most of the journalists had been reinstated.
In the midst of all of this, Twitter Safety announced a new policy forbidding the linking to or “free promotion” of profiles…
