On the one hand, Musk has already retracted his claim[1] that he's a "free speech absolutist"[2], so I don't think it's fair to come after him for that:<p><pre><code> In last month’s interview with the BBC, Musk said, “the rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country … If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.” At another point in the interview, Musk said: “If people of a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it.”
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But blocking links to hacked documents regarding JD Vance seems a little suspect considering that, as the article mentions, he was opposed to blocking links to hacked documents about Hunter Biden:<p><pre><code> Twitter, before it was bought by Elon Musk, had a policy regarding hacked materials — but the page is no longer available. A pre-Musk version of the policy, dated 2019, stated that posting or linking to hacked content is prohibited. Under this policy, links to a story by The New York Post about Hunter Biden, the current president’s son, were banned. But in October 2020, Twitter changed its policy to say that it would no longer block hacked materials, after an outcry about how the company had handled the Post story. “Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix,” wrote then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
Musk was one of the people who was unhappy with the decision to ban links to the Post’s story. “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk wrote of the decision on the story in April 2022. He even invited former Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi to examine internal documents showing how Twitter handled the decision. (In the course of tweeting his conclusions, Taibbi exposed the email addresses of Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna.)
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[1]: <a href="https://www.cato.org/commentary/elon-musk-sues-critics-silence-so-much-free-speech#" rel="nofollow">https://www.cato.org/commentary/elon-musk-sues-critics-silen...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-government-takedown/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-govern...</a>