Maybe he did something else, and that is bad, but let's not move goalposts.
> he retweeted someone who doxxed her email address
"Doxxing" for revealing email address a bit exaggeration. This is also bad, but doxxing usually means revealing something which may give people significant distress. Like home address.
Also if there's a screenshot of such tweet. Since it seems to be disappeared from the internet, probably nobody really cared.
> Musk is setting his army of fanboys loose on Lopez
This is journalistic exaggeration. There's no proof of that in the article. Mentioning someone in Twitter does not mean he intentionally sets "his army of fanboys".
> I know of exactly zero other social media platforms that ban the mere mention of other social media platforms
WhatsApp banned links to Telegram.
Facebook ranks links to Twitter/YouTube lower than content without such links.
> Precisely none of those companies are owned entirely by individuals claiming to be "free speech absolutists"
Either Elon Musk is no longer "free speech absolutist" or does not consider Twitter policy must match his personal preferences.
> Mastodon is not a company, major or otherwise
Competition may be not only for money, but also competition for users. It is quite possible that critical number of users will leave Twitter for Mastodon.
chadloder seems like a decent person. I'd like to know what Elon or Twitter has on him.
Musk promised that everyone will get explanation why they were banned. I'm waiting for it.
> It's clearly political.
It may be personal, but I doubt it is political. It just happens that people who attack Elon are on the left, and people who were banned by previous administration and unbanned now are on the right, so it looks political.
Of course, Twitter moderation should not be based on personal preferences of Elon.
I change my mind constantly when I get more information. But my opinion of Musk is not polar either absolute evil and absolute good. When he does something good, I give him a point, when he makes a mistake, I subtract a point.
So far Elon was net positive for Twitter.
Hyperloop, I don't think this is a big deal. Musk has thousands ideas, not all of them work.
I don't care about pedo story. It was inappropriate for sure, but everyone can make mistakes. Who is without sin... I prefer people who make mistakes openly to people who know how signal virtue.
In the end, for me, it is important what you do, and not as much, what you say.
I think it was this: she tagged Elon (and emailed him), so he went looking at her account. Found some older posts and reported them (maybe his assistant did that).
And the account was banned until the links are removed by the account owner (this is how twitter deals with such posts).
Taylor Lorenz did enough harm already, for example, revealing identity of libsoftiktok was inappropriate, she is a bad person.
I don't think that anything prior to rule introduction should stay forever. If she was forced to delete it, that's fine.
Because people do not threaten FB to leave to Mastodon. But you can't link (maybe you can now, but some time ago you couldn't) to Telegram inside Whatsapp, because Facebook considered Telegram a competitor.
> You can search on Google about DuckDuckGo
Again, because Google does not consider DDG a competitor.
But a while ago (long before the war when everybody were at peace), Russia was the only country where Google Chrome did not offer the choice of search engine. Because Russia was the only country where Google was not the leading search engine. There's famous commit in Chromium repository which explicitly excludes Russia.
I must say, VPS_Report is an evil person. I don't know if he deserves his right to speech after he posted his threats, but I won't miss him on Twitter.
Andy Ngo is fine. You may disagree with him, but he only does journalist work.
This is not exactly free speech issue, because Twitter does not ban based on political preferences/opinions.
This is dishonest competition (all other major companies do the same but not as blunt: Facebook, Google, Amazon for example). Twitter could be an exception. But it won't.
(Sorry for offtopic here, original thread is closed, and I don't have your other contacts.)