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‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Hides Effective Political Ad That Calls Out GOP
from the no-advertising-for-you dept
A few weeks ago, the Progress Action Fund released a political ad in Ohio that went somewhat viral on social media. I saw one person refer to it as “the most effective political ad” they’d ever seen.
And, I mean, even if you don’t agree with the message, you have to admit that (1) it gets your attention, and (2) it damn well gets its message across better than your standard political ad.
So, anyway, it appears that commercial is a bit too hot and heavy (or upsetting to the Republican party that Elon has publicly said everyone should vote for), that he, free speech warrior that he is, has banned it, and “shadowbanned” (according to Musk and his fans) the Progress Action Fund’s account:
According to the Progress Action Fund, which aims to defeat Republicans in red states, the platform “has censored” its account as well as the ad, called “Keep Republicans Out Of Your Bedroom.” In addition, the platform has “placed a ‘Search Ban’ and a ‘Search Suggestion Ban’ on the account.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the account did not show up on the social media platform, yet the ad could still be seen on X through retweets from other accounts.
The Progress Action Fund said it contacted the platform’s legal department and “appealed the decision, which was denied.”
Elon, of course, has said that he’s so supportive of free speech that he’ll defend it “even if it means losing money.”
In this case, well, he’s losing money. But I’m a but confused as to how it’s defending free speech when he’s banned the ad?
At first, I actually wondered if this was a holdover from the old Twitter’s (somewhat shortsighted) policy of not allowing political ads. But, I had forgotten that Musk rescinded that policy.
Some have suggested that it was shadowbanned because of the “sexual” nature of the ad, but there is way more graphic content all over ex-Twitter.
Of course, it’s possible it was just a mistake. Or, perhaps a bunch of GOP trolls brigaded the reporting system until ex-Twitter’s remaining trust & safety person decided to “max deboost” the video?
Who really knows?
But, given the nature of the ad, it’s yet another reason to question Musk’s actual commitment to free speech (which has never been an actual thing to anyone who actually understands free speech and who has paid attention to Musk over the years).
Filed Under: advertising, content moderation, elon musk, free speech, shadowbanning, visibility filtering
Companies: twitter, x
Comments on “‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Hides Effective Political Ad That Calls Out GOP”
Looks like little Elon got cranky again. Someone quickly give him his pacifier and put him for a nap before he throws another tantrum.
I, for one, can’t wait for the “he bought Twitter to end all the censorship” crowd to explain this one away—especially after Musk literally unbanned someone who linked to CSAM. 🍿
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None of this can be explained in terms not involving hypocrisy, particularly after this response from the chief Xeet to the criticism of censorship for Erdogan: “Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” Posted the next day after this passage about losing money shown in the article.
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I love you for casually sneaking “Xeet” in there…
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Moderation is an exercise of free speech, and Elon is exercising his platform-owned free speech in an absolutist manner.
It’s like religious freedom allowing a regent to freely choose the church of their subjects.
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Linked to CSAM? Oh hell no, they posted a screenshot from a video that’s reportedly the most vile CSAM video floating around out there. (See the comments by rahaeli on this post. They saw the post and work in Trust and Safety, so they’ve seen the video it’s from.)
Musk reinstated an account that posted CSAM. Not linked to it, posted it directly. That seems like an explicit endorsement of sexually abusing children to me.
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Something something he knows his target demographic.
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… An entire day later and nary a peep, how strange. You’d think the same people that were bending over backwards to defend the person and platform that gave the seal of approval to posting CSAM would have been all over this story as well.
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You know the kind of people who whine about “censorship” when it’s a situation involving a right-winger being heckled in meatspace or losing their spot on a cyberspace platform they don’t own? Those people never complain about actual censorship.
When was it ever a question? Absolutely nobody should be surprised as to how Elmo is handling content moderation.
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Yes, before he bought Twitter and said he was pro-free speech he didn’t have a track record to suggest otherwise. Of course Tesla did some petty thin-skinned shit that now it’s clear Elon ordered.
I think Musk changed a few years ago when he started buying into MAGA conspiracy theories. He was always susceptible to this kind of trash but was more on the fence. Then he went down the rabbit hole around when he bought Twitter and his brain totally melted.
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It started slightly earlier, publicly with pandemic related statements, then fears of depopulation (which have now been focused to white depopulation), then raving about online censorship and only then starting the whole mess with buying Twitter. All for the greater good. The depopulation part was “hilarious” while some of his employees would sometimes admit they don’t have time to even own a pet. That’s only a small part.
Here’s some more parts: his second giga-factory was built in China, he would sometimes spout nonsense along the lines of “the chinese gov’t seems to care about the happiness of its citizens”, he’d engage with russian officials, today he’d happily cave in to authoritarians.
I think he is neither right wing nor left wing in the strict sense of the terms. He chooses what sounds good to him, without taking the time to analyze anything beyond the surface level, picks every opportunity to profit, enjoys concentrations of wealth and attention and clings to them. In short, he cares for humanity as a concept, but has no empathy to anyone at all, no proper structure to any of his beliefs or morals, no capacity to figure out complex interactions first, no impulse control, lots of hurt feelings. Plus, he’s pathologically stubborn, vengeful, has a sense of humor of a 12-tear old. Those qualities make him the perfect useful idiot for the right wing, he just needed a little push into the alternative fact reality, he won’t be able to figure it out, won’t notice the suffering he’s creating and won’t stop.
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I fully agree. The obvious comparison is Trump, who isn’t sincerely right or left wing. He’s authoritarian, thin skinned, and egotistical but that’s not inherently left or right. But he found himself at home with the American right, who have a soft spot for idiots like him, and went with it.
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The only difference is, that Trump’s qualities produced nothing but an empire of smoke, mirrors, criminality, rage and BS, while Musk managed to push for something worthwhile. Not perfect, particularly Tesla, but the stated mission and progress towards the goals is good.
The funniest similarity between the two, is that they created an inner circle of incompetent hangers on and then decided to listen to them instead of professionals that have been working on issues at hand for ages.
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And had a cadre of competent hangers on who … edited the ‘truth’ for the boss, in service to the cause the boss was notionally in favor of, but self-defeating in practice.
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Musk has always succeeded in spite of himself. He almost destroyed Paypal pushing for his whole X thing, as well as moving it to Microsoft servers. (At that time, MS server products could not scale to the level Paypal required.) The only reason Paypal succeeded and Musk made a fortune from it was because they did a coup and removed him as CEO.
Tesla wasn’t perfect, but was okay-ish before Musk started taking more hands-on control in recent years. He’s removed all the sensors from the cars except cameras, insisting that’s all that’s needed to achieve Full Self Driving. (It’s not, and is a big part of why they keep running into stopped vehicles with Autopilot on.) He even used a firmware update to disable the other sensors on existing Teslas that had them. As a result Teslas were made less safe and more dangerous to others on the road. He’s destroying that company, just more slowly than Twitter.
And the only reason SpaceX is so successful is because he put a competent CEO in charge and let her run things with minimal interference. If he started meddling with it, he’d undoubtedly ruin it as well.
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Looking at CSI Starbase’s recount of Starship testing on YT gave me a strong impression that “someone” was pushing for complete prototypes before major structural pieces were properly thought out, let alone ground tested, which continues to result in a lot of scrap and rework. Similarly, the launch pad sending massive slabs of concrete some hundreds feet into the air and all over the place seemed very poorly designed. Same channel has a good explainer of what happened then. Importantly, SpaceX was very close to needing a complete rebuild of the place, either because of rocket RUD, or shrapnel damage, or cratering the launch table.
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It turns out ‘move fast and break things’ doesn’t scale physically very well.
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Like with a lot of things in life, there’s a gradient. The bigger are the consequences of things breaking, the more care should be exercised to prevent the worst. A circuit board releasing some magic smoke or a piece of code doing something bad in the dev environment? Even most people within the company don’t need to know. 5000T flying bomb nearly obliterating all the foundations of the pad, puncturing one of the storage tanks (luckily, it was water), potentially hitting the launch mount with its engines, definitely being close to having not enough trust to climb, experiencing several explosions in flight, possibly developing a big leak in its engine compartment, losing control and then taking 40 seconds to finally terminate its flight… That’s spectacular, reckless and could have gone way worse.
The bigger the scale, the more there are externalities to the approach.
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No-one is surprised, they’re just having fun pointing out the rampant hypocrisy of how downright eager the ‘free speech absolutist’ is to silence people he doesn’t like and how his supporters jump from ‘platforms silencing people is censorship!’ to ‘He owns it, it’s his decision who and what he wants on it and there’s nothing wrong with that’.
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“He owns it” isn’t exactly a good argument when he starts allowing CSAM material on it and disallows the Ukranians from fighting for their lives using his property…
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When have sycophants ever had a good argument?
Look What I Can Do! (MadTV Stewart voice)
Hypocrisy is the point with this type of person.
They want everyone to know they are special and are allowed to do things that others are not, and therefore they are very special.
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The reason he is “allowed” to do shit is that he is able to afford the allowance. He is paying a whole lot to play in the major league of hypocrisy. Other hypocrites don’t pay similar amounts for an opportunity of talking out of both ends of their mouth.
Maybe he does not have a big enough mouth to play in the big leagues of hypocrisy without investing a lot. On the plus side, his mouth is big enough to have other people’s money to invest.
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Was big enough. I doubt he’ll get anyone to invest billions in any of his ventures in the future after burning $44 billion with Twitter.
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On the one hand I think you’re vastly overestimating the intelligence of the kinds of of people he’d look to to fund his next dumpster fire, on the other hand if someone’s stupid enough to give Elon money they kinda have it coming.
Let me help you out there. He was referring to his free speech, not yours.
Ex Twitter = xitter pronounced shitter
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Folks, don’t let Mike M. tell you that he isn’t a Democratic Party operative!
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‘Supporting censorship of your political opponents’ is a republican ideal, good to know.
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Well, fuck me!
I didn’t know all that glowing coverage of Ron Wyden was him being a Dem shill rather than highlighting good policy!
/s
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Exactly why should we not let Mike continue to tell the honest, factual truth?
'Free speech doesn't include the right to belong to a political party I don't like'
Republican/conservative/free speech absolutist free speech: ‘You are free to say what we want you to and/or agree with and nothing else.’
Ah Xitter, bends over backwards to reinstate an account that posted some heinouse-even-for-CSAM CSAM, removes and shadowbans a political ad and the account that posted it respectively. Really showing what sort of content Elon does and does not want on his platform there and to say it’s not a good look would be putting it mildly.
‘Twitter’, ‘X’, whatever…
It’s not a social media platform anymore; it’s a fiefdom.
The Big Lie
Can we finally put to bed the idea that Elon Musk wants free speech on Twitter?
Space Karen suffers from the delusions that many people seem to have these days, its only bad when the other side does it.
While restoring the idiot who posted CSAM (and IIRC didn’t actually report the event like the law requires) is an extreme example its very on the Space Karen brand.
All of those times people were screaming that Twitter was letting the lefties get away with things they never could, a few times it was true. (Leslie Jones not being suspended after using the same words that got people attacking her suspended leaps to mind). But there were also those on the right who did horrible things all the time & never even got the hint of a tsk but those replying in the same fashion got nuked from orbit.
A bunch of old white men, who will do anything to keep the base from turning on them, are demanding all of these laws & punishments for things they claim are wrong but shockingly they get caught doing them and so much worse & get a pass.
X is not the place if you want to spread a message anymore. Space Karen can make decisions in a nanosecond with no thought about what doing them might cause, while saying the decision shoudl only apply to the side not currently in his favor.
The ad wasn’t that sexual, I follow fscking (yes I know I can say fuck here I tend not to) porn stars posting videos of having sex and they never get shadowbanned. (Well some of them have blue checks, so I am thinking that has something to do with it.)
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MDS?
In addition to Covid Derangement syndrome and TDS, I think we have to add MDS to the list.
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I don’t see how calling out actual facts about Elon Musk and the horrible way he’s handled running Twitter qualifies as “derangement”, but you do you, son.
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…hallucinates nobody mentally competent, ever.
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I LOVE the concept of TDS (the idea that a thrice indicted, twice impeached, multiple bankruptcy, twice divorced, continually adultering, constantly lying, grifter might not be a good fit for a president) having an equivalent with MDS.
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Is dying on this hill worth it to you?
Mind you, you’re defending whute supremacy, insurrection, apartheid, the hiding of critical data about new illnesses, the posting of actual child pornography,and hindering a sovereign country doing mklitary operations because they got fucking invaded for no good reason.
If that’s what you want to defend,then don’t be surprised when you face your consequences. Because you are most likely a treasonous cur in the service of either Russia or China.
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MDS that thing you fanbois do to get senpai to notice you?
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Nice Sharing
“Your kindness and positivity shine bright, making the world a better place. Keep spreading joy and love!”
Unquestionably effective, the progress action fund campaign advertisement in Ohio.
Even among those who might disagree with the message, its impact has sparked conversation.
The ad excels above the usual fare of political advertisements in its ability to draw viewers in and effectively deliver its message.
But it significant that the ferocity appears to have sparked debate, maybe leading to its removal Elon Mask involvement in the circumstance adds to the complexity of the matter.
Despite being a strong supporter of free speech, some have questioned wither his position has been consistent in light of current events.