He is abusing the trust people had in the platform before he took it over. Many people believe what they read on there wholesale because it had a decade of semi-legitimate journalist and other respected figures participating.
Former Twitter employees admitted the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t violate any Twitter policies but it was taken down anyway. They also admitted they made no attempt to verify the authenticity of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The conservative-leaning parody site, The Babylon Bee, was suspended by Twitter for 12 hours, after it had mockingly awarded transgender government official Rachel Levine the title "Man of the Year."
Bit hyperbolic ?
Anyway, that link you sen is hilarious, Twitter is a private company and platform, they can stop showing useless stories if they want too, there is no law against removing total rubbish from the platform.
Twitter also had a right to "free speech".
I'd only really any of this as a problem if laws were passed banning discussion about..."the holy laptop".
The bee is lame, I'd remove that from my platform too.
How do you get to authoritarian, when it’s the Brazilian authorities demanding that people be silenced? Perhaps you’re referring to some unrelated situation where X has been censoring people?
Also, those accounts were used by people who were investigated by the equivalent of the FBI, the Policia Federal (PF). The initial request to block those accounts AFAIK came from them, and the fact that this case ended up in the hands of the Supreme Court is because Elon decided to play chicken, escalating the situation in every possible way for seemingly no good reason.
That may make the Brazilian government less authoritarian, but that doesn’t make anyone else more authoritarian. If anything, the fact that Musk is opposing even a very small act of authoritarianism would suggest that he is very strongly against authoritarianism.
In Turkey this wouldn't fly for even a second. He thinks he can make an example out of Brazil (and it's clearly striking a nerve even if it ends up not working out.)
As another commenter noted, the illegal content (under Brazilian law) on Twitter is one thing, but additionally Twitter has not responded to any legal action and does not have a representative in the country, which Brazilian law requires of them (https://apnews.com/article/brazil-x-elon-musk-shutdown-morae...). Musk can whine all he wants, but boring procdural rules still apply to him.
Additionally, Musk complies prolifically with censorship requests when they come from racist fascists like Narendra Modi. The source for that is literally Twitter itself in its report on removal requests (the link is in this article): https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or... .
What's the difference? Well, Musk likes Modi and his vicious crackdown on Muslims, and he doesn't like Lula's government because he's a popular leftist. Like, you don't have to agree with either side to see that the only principle at play here is Musk's personal political grievances.
