There is a simple answer here: those other countries don’t pretend to have free speech. They don’t pretend to be liberal. They’re nakedly authoritarian and Americans generally don’t doubt this.
Western elites have been justifying their authoritarianism on the grounds of “protecting democracy.” There’s a clear movement to try and prevent criticism of the powers that be. If free speech dies in the west, it’s dead forever.
When it comes to suppression of speech by governments, I'm not sure Musk is so much a hypocrite as much as someone whose brain has been melted by right-wing shitposts and ragebait. It seems as if he's lost sight of politics beyond his feed of infinite scroll to the point that his behavioral dissonance doesn't even register in his psyche. His suppression of links to Substack, on the other hand, appears much more blatant
Yeah, I've been somewhat shocked by his shit posting. He doesn't seem like an intelligent person who understands nuance, which is weird because he can't actually be that dumb. I think a lot of this actually comes down to fear of unions and the rest is cover. That or his brain really did melt by the internet.
I suspect he probably started going more right due to fear of unions etc, but his addiction to Twitter probably melted his brain and then the Biden DOJ's lawsuits probably cemented his tribalism
Elon Musk is for free speech just enough for it to be marketable and contribute to his cult of personality. Even where I agree with him, I discourage people from listening to him because he lacks integrity.
I’m sure there’s a simple enough answer for his intentions: you can easily point to how lucrative it is to do business with the Saudis and China. Public figures in the West kowtow to their anti-enlightenment sensitivities all the time.
Of course, that’s also an easy and convenient reason. There could be a ton more involved. It also stands to reason that Musk could just be a chickenshit whose buttered bread does the talking. The UK? Easy target. The US? Same thing. Most of the ostracism in the US is posturing; after how many years of derision directed at Musk, and he’s still successful, and even moreso?
By the way, I’d like to disclaim that this is purely hypothetical. I don’t have hard data, so grain of salt.
I think the key principle in dangerous times is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” These are exceptionally dangerous times.
Musk is a powerful enemy of the surveillance and censorship regime and the soft totalitarianism that is approaching a tipping point to become—irrevocably—hard totalitarianism.
That appears to be what’s happening in the UK.
I’m proud to consider Musk, who has never heard of me (although I knew one of his ex-wives) my friend.
Fair point. But as with Trump, you can have someone who’s a friend act like a reckless idiot and activate a bunch of forces against your cause. This is my sense of what is happening, but I would be delighted to be wrong.
Your diagnosis of Trump is all wrong. Look at the reactions to any other Republican: Vance, DeSantis, whoever. They all get the same treatment. Trump didn't do anything specific to trigger or deserve his treatment, other than running for President as a Republican. The narrative of him being reckless is hard to back up with facts, for example, his lack of war starting would paint the opposite picture.
I'm not, but I think my understanding of your politics is just fine. Reckless leaders do reckless things, starting wars being the most reckless amongst such acts historically. Provoking China with new tariffs might have counted if that hadn't swiftly become the new consensus, and it didn't seem to have any blowback yet.
What acts has he done that are reckless, exactly? Aesthetics don't count: you said he acts like a reckless idiot, not that he sounds like one.
If you were living in Germany in 1930 you could say that about the Nazis. They may want to unleash a horrible regime but at least they aren't communists, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend right? The enemy of liberalism is authoritarianism full stop.
The irony of course being that by the end of the Weimar Republic, the communists were the ones who deprioritized the Nazis as a primary threat and to some extent even saw them as a useful tool against the ultimate evil, the Social Democrats. And then of course got thrown in the camps with all the other leftists when Hitler took the throne.
Indeed. Enemy of my enemy is a very tight rope to walk. If China nationalizes Tesla’s factories when it invades Taiwan, Musk may come to regret pitting the West against itself while boosting Chinese propaganda. https://x.com/michaelsobolik/status/1701926222962266341
So Russia sanctioned roughly 400 people for speech violations last year and the UK 3500ish. True to form for Russia, jaw dropping for the UK. The Anglosphere in unison is bringing in all manner of censorial legislation. Elon is doing us all a great service by waving the red here. If we lose free speech in the West, it’s bad for everyone and there really is no hope for reform across Saudi, China, Russia ever.
I’m sympathetic to this argument, but then the question is: Is Elon actually helping the speech situation by waving the red flag on the UK or is this going to harm his overall cause? My instinct is the latter because I think there will be negative reflexive effects, but we will see. I would be delighted to be wrong on this.
Can you cite that source, please? I’m betting it’s accurate, but I need to see what the consequences are. For instance, I’m betting that free speech sanctioning in Russia is much more consequential than in the UK, where there would be an uproar over any retaliatory treatment. I’m guessing all those sanctioned won’t get poisoned or defenestrated.
As well, I’m wondering how accurate those figures out of Russia are. They’re notorious for misinformation, and even if they’re accurate, it also pays to remember that there are probably far, far fewer Russians willing to be on the vanguard for free speech.
They are also already programmed well in Russia to toe the line but the fact that the West is going down this road is the point. Anyone guess that Dawkins would have his Facebook account suspended over sex dimorphism ffs? Seriously these are terrible trends in a highly complex era where free speech is essential
Not only that, but Dawkins also had his Humanist of the Year award stripped from him for trying to engage in a discussion about why race-fluidity isn’t as acceptable as gender-fluidity, which I find to be a perfectly humanist thing to do.
So far, it seems like the power of speech regulation is in the purview of institutions. If I were Dawkins, I wouldn’t give a shit about the Humanist award or Facebook. Especially the latter since it panders to the lowest common denominator.
As it stands, the consequences seem mostly relegated to online ostracism, and I say whoop-de-doo. We haven’t broken out the gulags yet.
Also don’t forget: Russians are very socially and culturally distinct from Westerners. Completely different set of circumstances. Remember that free speech is what *we* champion, and it stands to reason that they would naturally balk at us foisting our own ideals on them. Not that I’m saying it’s all right, but it should be considered.
I don’t do sources in casual exchanges like this. You have the world in your palm just like I do and are perfectly capable of researching that and determining whether you think it’s credible or not. The “give me your sources” in these discussions always leads to, “I don’t like your source”. May I reiterate the main point so you aren’t focused on trying to weaken my argument through distractions, the fact that the UK is now going all in on thought policing their populations online is a highly troubling trend. I lived under authoritarian rule, I know what it looks and feels like. I know what kind of society it leads to.
People are being sent to prison for years in the UK for Facebook posts. So there doesn't seem to be any difference in harshness, except for scale. Also note that Russia has 2x the population of the UK, so you have to scale those numbers accordingly. Censorship of political dissent is off the charts in the UK.
People being sent to prison over FB posts in the UK? I find that hard to believe. That’s a lot of resources wasted on their justice system for such a seemingly small infraction. Link me to a source, if you can.
Yeah, it's hard to believe except that it's now happening. Just browse through Musk's recent X posts, or search Google News if you want the media take on it.
We’ll see how this all plays out. These might be freak incidents that might not be precedents. I don’t think that it means that it can’t be appealed, but I will say the Keir Starmer is sure asking for more unrest if he keeps thinking that it’s okay for government to keep fucking around in private affairs.
My thing is we shouldn’t lose our heads about this, because yes, it is a problem, but it’s not new. YouTube personality Count Dankula faced a similar injustice when the UK fined him for making an admittedly tasteless antisemitic joke.
Problem is - and don’t think the right wing is gonna save you on this, because they’re cresting the same wave - that politicians have gotten completely distracted by petty social affairs, and they know they can manipulate temperament to garner unfettered support. Think of how readily your average commentator is ready to pull out all the stops to defend their chosen side against “fascists” and “communists”. That’s carte blanche for politicians to get away with murder, because they know you will never be critical of “your side”; they’ve already got you fighting with your fellow man!
What this means is people don’t have to vote to give politicians dictatorial power, because they’re doing it every day. And as long as protests support one side or the other and the media milks it for controversy dollars, it will never get better. In fact, it will never get better until people realize that all the politicians are flawed, but that won’t happen because as soon as they’re done bitching about the news, they just go back to raising their kids or buying merchandise.
The problems in the UK are to a large extent because people have realised politicians are flawed. They just had an election and turnout collapsed. The left wing party won, but not because it became popular. It won because the Conservative party had become so left wing, had lied about controlling immigration so often, that the entire British right wing basically gave up on them. The election before that saw huge levels of vote transfer from left to right, because Boris Johnson promised to "get brexit done" and then reduce immigration. He did the former (sort of) but not the latter. Vote levels for the right in many areas of the country halved or more, but those votes didn't transfer to the left. People just checked out of democracy entirely. What remained of the right wing vote then split between the Conservatives and Reform, hence, left wing victory, which they are now exploiting for all its worth.
When people stop thinking there's a democratic solution, rioting becomes the next alternative. Unfortunately they're correct that there's no democratic solution on the horizon. Now Labour are in power they will continue to import new voters who will always prop them up, without caring what people born in Britain think. The right will remain split because the older generation who get all their news from TV think Nigel Farage is an awful racist (he isn't, but the media claim he is). So there's likely to be continuing civil unrest for the forseeable future, hence why Starmer is so keen to create a police state.
I'm inclined to view Musk's, err, balls and strikes as driven first by business needs (cf KSA and PRC) and secondarily by the valence they have for _US_ politics and where Musk sees himself there; something civil liberties equivalent** to recent events happening in the UK during e.g. Truss' brief PMship and with left-coded rioters would likely get a pass.
** yes, I know that regardless of whether Labour or the Conservatives are in Downing Street, the UK overall has less US-style freedom of the press, and more surveillance, than the US does.
Re terrible meta-Freudian slips caused by what I assume are autocorrect glitches,
"But Musk’s wonton anti-UK shitposting is different because of his vast platform power."
I used to like Musk. Can’t stand him anymore. His brain has been ruined by boomerslop Facebook memes, Twitter is filled with bots and plagued by platform manipulation, all while Elon has worked hard to make it as addictive as possible and kneecapping genuinely independent media, like Substack.
I was shocked at how vicious he was toward the people who helped him break the Twitter files. I guess I hoped it would just be a sort of moment of bad judgement, rather than indicative of broader issues with him. Turns out it was the latter.
...elon musk reveals everything about himself with what he does and doesn’t say, what he does and doesn’t do...he is concerned with having kids, but not raising them (no father of five mothers with 10+ children and 4+ business babies has enough time to raise a child)...he is what he always has been, the angry son of a south african diamond miner...an obsessed 12 year old shitposter protected by wealth...overrated but important and petulant...
Is much of the answer to your questions about Musk’s hypocritical silence is: “money talks”? From the cap table to Saudi, to China. His moneyed interests seem to have a higher importance than free speech.
Or he has different standards when it comes to free speech à la four legs good; two legs bad.
I tend to reflexively reject accusations of hypocrisy, because they usually fall into one of two categories: 1) a tu quoque, which is a logical and ad hominem fallacy or 2) (usually-progressive) elevation of fairness to the exclusion of other virtues (see Haidt, The Righteous Mind).
To give this a fair shake, though, I have to ask: Is the issue that he's going after a softer target in the UK that is less likely to fight back, or is he whoring himself out to business interests in these other nations? Or maybe he thinks the UK will listen and hopefully respond, while KSA, Russia, and China surely won't at best, if not tell him "Message Received"?
I would hope that this article isn't a proxy battle over his politics. I'm long CRM but I think Marc Benioff's politics flat out suck.
I suppose he could go after KSA/PRC/Russia, but would that be a fool's errand? And if Musk is not doing a good job of managing Twitter, what exactly should he do differently?
Do you think Musk would criticize the UK if they were arresting people for encouraging violence in the name of Palestine? It's not about Musks politics per se, it's that his free speech mantle seems to be a way to pretend that his ordinary political views are part of the valiant fight for freedom. There's nothing wrong with being partisan, but if your going to claim to be something else you should act like it. Everyone thinks their OWN side should have free speech, real free speech is believing that BOTH sides should have it.
Surely almost everything in this BBC piece is true. However, while I can’t say for sure, I would be curious if it wasn’t more than him writing mean things that got him killed. I’m not sure the Saudi government has ever spoken to his death and the reasons for it in a detailed way that seems to shed light on what happened there. I’m also not sure how much to trust that the Saudi government or the domestic press would give me the straight facts.
Journalist is a very good cover if you are an intelligence asset since it allows you to set the default framing to you’re being killed only for what you are writing and not, say, which foreign governments you are writing at the behest of. He may have also been up to things you personally would not tolerate as a head of state that have nothing to do with writing at all. Is someone at BBC best friends with MBS? Do they get froyo together? Am I missing something here? Their sources, were these the same people talking about The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island?
When you see news of someone killed, without automatically blaming them, it’s good to ask what they did to get killed so you can at least weigh whether you want to risk the same fate. For instance, I make a point of not hiking through the Hindu Kush as my left leg is lame and they don’t celebrate Shabat. There are profiles for who is more likely to get murdered and who is more likely to get raped. It is just completely taboo to talk about.
Our country murders people all the time (sometimes with extrajudicial drones). My state just executed someone the other day. If he had a Blogspot, the New York Times would have accused Governor Abbot of crimes against humanity. The Times was conspicuously absent on the tragedy of Assange’s treatment or else it took the position that we had afforded him a fate too kind.
Free speech has never existed in totality anywhere. Elon isn’t perfect but surely his budget for hypocrisy seems higher than the previous Dorsey/Gadde regime. He also appears to censor less since he does not appear to grant the Federal government access to muting rogue citizens carte blanche.
I feel bad for Khashoggi but I’m not sure anyone who talks about it has the real scoop.
Surely the answer is obvious. He's talking about the UK because the UK is in the news and those other countries aren't. The UK throwing people in prison for posting things on X is:
a) Relatively new (at this scale)
b) Bad for business (the UK is frequently the second largest market for American tech firms after America itself)
c) A bad omen for the USA (which now has a VP candidate who has stated the first amendment doesn't protect hate speech)
Additionally, the UK claims to be a liberal democracy, whereas China and Saudi Arabia specifically don't. These are all legitimate reasons to comment on the situation in the UK, and doesn't make him hypocritical any more than NYT op-eds are hypocritical for not including a global review of every country in the world every time they pass opinion on one of them.
By the way, I grew up in the UK and have family there. I am cheering Musk on. The idea he's meddling is nonsense, Americans comment on the politics of foreign countries all the time and Brits do it even moreso in reverse. Also there is widespread disgust in the UK at what the government is doing, but also a sense of overwhelming helplessness. Labour just won their election (with fewer votes than they got in 2017, when they lost). They're very unpopular already at the start but there's four more years of this, at minimum. And that's assuming that by the time another election happens they haven't simply imprisoned everyone who disagrees with them and formalized state censorship, which appears to be the direction they're going on.
The world is full of countries that were once prosperous and stable until the left took power, often in the last free election they ever had. Argentina and Venezuela remind us of what can go wrong when people vote in the left. Musk is one of the only people with a megaphone calling attention to this situation, and he's a hero for doing so. The man just can't stop doing things right, it's incredible to witness.
Israel, Russia (war and invasion!) have been much more in the news much more than the UK, and yet he’s been mum.
Your last paragraph is a fair point but still gets the question of whether nitpicking liberal democracies over truly authoritarian regimes advances his cause or will backfire.
The war in Ukraine started years ago, Israel's war in Gaza started last year. Neither are in the news for speech issues specifically, which is what Musk cares about the most, seeing as he owns a company that makes money off of speech. And Musk tweeted about Gaza less than 24h ago, so it's not like he only talks about the UK.
I don't think what Musk says will have any impact on the UK or the cause of free speech either way. His actions will and already do, but that's different. Free speech is a strange cause to believe in, because those of us who do believe in it tend to believe that it's both very important, and also that individual opinions don't have much impact. That makes sense if you view speech as primarily about communicating information/facts and aggregating views, rather than a Great Man perspective in which, say, a single historic speech changes the world. If individual speech isn't important then it doesn't make sense to build huge infrastructures to suppress it. If you believe in the power of a single historic speech, then who gets to speak and who has to listen becomes very important, and such societies end up with China-style speech controls.
There is a simple answer here: those other countries don’t pretend to have free speech. They don’t pretend to be liberal. They’re nakedly authoritarian and Americans generally don’t doubt this.
Western elites have been justifying their authoritarianism on the grounds of “protecting democracy.” There’s a clear movement to try and prevent criticism of the powers that be. If free speech dies in the west, it’s dead forever.
That explains why he cares more about free speech in the west than other places, it doesn't explain absolute silence.
When it comes to suppression of speech by governments, I'm not sure Musk is so much a hypocrite as much as someone whose brain has been melted by right-wing shitposts and ragebait. It seems as if he's lost sight of politics beyond his feed of infinite scroll to the point that his behavioral dissonance doesn't even register in his psyche. His suppression of links to Substack, on the other hand, appears much more blatant
Yeah, I've been somewhat shocked by his shit posting. He doesn't seem like an intelligent person who understands nuance, which is weird because he can't actually be that dumb. I think a lot of this actually comes down to fear of unions and the rest is cover. That or his brain really did melt by the internet.
I suspect he probably started going more right due to fear of unions etc, but his addiction to Twitter probably melted his brain and then the Biden DOJ's lawsuits probably cemented his tribalism
Elon Musk is for free speech just enough for it to be marketable and contribute to his cult of personality. Even where I agree with him, I discourage people from listening to him because he lacks integrity.
I’m sure there’s a simple enough answer for his intentions: you can easily point to how lucrative it is to do business with the Saudis and China. Public figures in the West kowtow to their anti-enlightenment sensitivities all the time.
Of course, that’s also an easy and convenient reason. There could be a ton more involved. It also stands to reason that Musk could just be a chickenshit whose buttered bread does the talking. The UK? Easy target. The US? Same thing. Most of the ostracism in the US is posturing; after how many years of derision directed at Musk, and he’s still successful, and even moreso?
By the way, I’d like to disclaim that this is purely hypothetical. I don’t have hard data, so grain of salt.
I think the key principle in dangerous times is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” These are exceptionally dangerous times.
Musk is a powerful enemy of the surveillance and censorship regime and the soft totalitarianism that is approaching a tipping point to become—irrevocably—hard totalitarianism.
That appears to be what’s happening in the UK.
I’m proud to consider Musk, who has never heard of me (although I knew one of his ex-wives) my friend.
Fair point. But as with Trump, you can have someone who’s a friend act like a reckless idiot and activate a bunch of forces against your cause. This is my sense of what is happening, but I would be delighted to be wrong.
Your diagnosis of Trump is all wrong. Look at the reactions to any other Republican: Vance, DeSantis, whoever. They all get the same treatment. Trump didn't do anything specific to trigger or deserve his treatment, other than running for President as a Republican. The narrative of him being reckless is hard to back up with facts, for example, his lack of war starting would paint the opposite picture.
In curious, are you American? Your understanding of our politics is consistently off.
I'm not, but I think my understanding of your politics is just fine. Reckless leaders do reckless things, starting wars being the most reckless amongst such acts historically. Provoking China with new tariffs might have counted if that hadn't swiftly become the new consensus, and it didn't seem to have any blowback yet.
What acts has he done that are reckless, exactly? Aesthetics don't count: you said he acts like a reckless idiot, not that he sounds like one.
What country are you from?
Why does it matter to you?
If you were living in Germany in 1930 you could say that about the Nazis. They may want to unleash a horrible regime but at least they aren't communists, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend right? The enemy of liberalism is authoritarianism full stop.
The irony of course being that by the end of the Weimar Republic, the communists were the ones who deprioritized the Nazis as a primary threat and to some extent even saw them as a useful tool against the ultimate evil, the Social Democrats. And then of course got thrown in the camps with all the other leftists when Hitler took the throne.
Indeed. Enemy of my enemy is a very tight rope to walk. If China nationalizes Tesla’s factories when it invades Taiwan, Musk may come to regret pitting the West against itself while boosting Chinese propaganda. https://x.com/michaelsobolik/status/1701926222962266341
So Russia sanctioned roughly 400 people for speech violations last year and the UK 3500ish. True to form for Russia, jaw dropping for the UK. The Anglosphere in unison is bringing in all manner of censorial legislation. Elon is doing us all a great service by waving the red here. If we lose free speech in the West, it’s bad for everyone and there really is no hope for reform across Saudi, China, Russia ever.
I’m sympathetic to this argument, but then the question is: Is Elon actually helping the speech situation by waving the red flag on the UK or is this going to harm his overall cause? My instinct is the latter because I think there will be negative reflexive effects, but we will see. I would be delighted to be wrong on this.
Fair point. It does seem chaotic for sure.
Can you cite that source, please? I’m betting it’s accurate, but I need to see what the consequences are. For instance, I’m betting that free speech sanctioning in Russia is much more consequential than in the UK, where there would be an uproar over any retaliatory treatment. I’m guessing all those sanctioned won’t get poisoned or defenestrated.
As well, I’m wondering how accurate those figures out of Russia are. They’re notorious for misinformation, and even if they’re accurate, it also pays to remember that there are probably far, far fewer Russians willing to be on the vanguard for free speech.
They are also already programmed well in Russia to toe the line but the fact that the West is going down this road is the point. Anyone guess that Dawkins would have his Facebook account suspended over sex dimorphism ffs? Seriously these are terrible trends in a highly complex era where free speech is essential
Yes, but we’re not at the Russian point just yet.
Not only that, but Dawkins also had his Humanist of the Year award stripped from him for trying to engage in a discussion about why race-fluidity isn’t as acceptable as gender-fluidity, which I find to be a perfectly humanist thing to do.
So far, it seems like the power of speech regulation is in the purview of institutions. If I were Dawkins, I wouldn’t give a shit about the Humanist award or Facebook. Especially the latter since it panders to the lowest common denominator.
As it stands, the consequences seem mostly relegated to online ostracism, and I say whoop-de-doo. We haven’t broken out the gulags yet.
Also don’t forget: Russians are very socially and culturally distinct from Westerners. Completely different set of circumstances. Remember that free speech is what *we* champion, and it stands to reason that they would naturally balk at us foisting our own ideals on them. Not that I’m saying it’s all right, but it should be considered.
I’m not willing to give an inch on free speech frankly. It underpins everything.
May I see your source, please?
I don’t do sources in casual exchanges like this. You have the world in your palm just like I do and are perfectly capable of researching that and determining whether you think it’s credible or not. The “give me your sources” in these discussions always leads to, “I don’t like your source”. May I reiterate the main point so you aren’t focused on trying to weaken my argument through distractions, the fact that the UK is now going all in on thought policing their populations online is a highly troubling trend. I lived under authoritarian rule, I know what it looks and feels like. I know what kind of society it leads to.
People are being sent to prison for years in the UK for Facebook posts. So there doesn't seem to be any difference in harshness, except for scale. Also note that Russia has 2x the population of the UK, so you have to scale those numbers accordingly. Censorship of political dissent is off the charts in the UK.
People being sent to prison over FB posts in the UK? I find that hard to believe. That’s a lot of resources wasted on their justice system for such a seemingly small infraction. Link me to a source, if you can.
Yeah, it's hard to believe except that it's now happening. Just browse through Musk's recent X posts, or search Google News if you want the media take on it.
https://news.google.com/search?q=prison%20for%20facebook%20posts&hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB%3Aen
"First jail terms handed down for social media posts during unrest"
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cpdlvz80pjzt
Police have even been filmed doing it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVzGtsAycBA
Okay, thanks.
We’ll see how this all plays out. These might be freak incidents that might not be precedents. I don’t think that it means that it can’t be appealed, but I will say the Keir Starmer is sure asking for more unrest if he keeps thinking that it’s okay for government to keep fucking around in private affairs.
My thing is we shouldn’t lose our heads about this, because yes, it is a problem, but it’s not new. YouTube personality Count Dankula faced a similar injustice when the UK fined him for making an admittedly tasteless antisemitic joke.
Problem is - and don’t think the right wing is gonna save you on this, because they’re cresting the same wave - that politicians have gotten completely distracted by petty social affairs, and they know they can manipulate temperament to garner unfettered support. Think of how readily your average commentator is ready to pull out all the stops to defend their chosen side against “fascists” and “communists”. That’s carte blanche for politicians to get away with murder, because they know you will never be critical of “your side”; they’ve already got you fighting with your fellow man!
What this means is people don’t have to vote to give politicians dictatorial power, because they’re doing it every day. And as long as protests support one side or the other and the media milks it for controversy dollars, it will never get better. In fact, it will never get better until people realize that all the politicians are flawed, but that won’t happen because as soon as they’re done bitching about the news, they just go back to raising their kids or buying merchandise.
Unfortunately these aren't freak incidents at all. It is explicitly stated government policy to do that:
https://x.com/GOVUK/status/1821502879590494358
They plan to ramp up enforcement significantly.
The problems in the UK are to a large extent because people have realised politicians are flawed. They just had an election and turnout collapsed. The left wing party won, but not because it became popular. It won because the Conservative party had become so left wing, had lied about controlling immigration so often, that the entire British right wing basically gave up on them. The election before that saw huge levels of vote transfer from left to right, because Boris Johnson promised to "get brexit done" and then reduce immigration. He did the former (sort of) but not the latter. Vote levels for the right in many areas of the country halved or more, but those votes didn't transfer to the left. People just checked out of democracy entirely. What remained of the right wing vote then split between the Conservatives and Reform, hence, left wing victory, which they are now exploiting for all its worth.
When people stop thinking there's a democratic solution, rioting becomes the next alternative. Unfortunately they're correct that there's no democratic solution on the horizon. Now Labour are in power they will continue to import new voters who will always prop them up, without caring what people born in Britain think. The right will remain split because the older generation who get all their news from TV think Nigel Farage is an awful racist (he isn't, but the media claim he is). So there's likely to be continuing civil unrest for the forseeable future, hence why Starmer is so keen to create a police state.
I'm inclined to view Musk's, err, balls and strikes as driven first by business needs (cf KSA and PRC) and secondarily by the valence they have for _US_ politics and where Musk sees himself there; something civil liberties equivalent** to recent events happening in the UK during e.g. Truss' brief PMship and with left-coded rioters would likely get a pass.
** yes, I know that regardless of whether Labour or the Conservatives are in Downing Street, the UK overall has less US-style freedom of the press, and more surveillance, than the US does.
Re terrible meta-Freudian slips caused by what I assume are autocorrect glitches,
"But Musk’s wonton anti-UK shitposting is different because of his vast platform power."
is pretty good :)
Musk also censors tweets that link to substack, because he sees substack as a competitor.
I used to like Musk. Can’t stand him anymore. His brain has been ruined by boomerslop Facebook memes, Twitter is filled with bots and plagued by platform manipulation, all while Elon has worked hard to make it as addictive as possible and kneecapping genuinely independent media, like Substack.
Yeah, my views on Elon are mixed and trending negative with time.
I was shocked at how vicious he was toward the people who helped him break the Twitter files. I guess I hoped it would just be a sort of moment of bad judgement, rather than indicative of broader issues with him. Turns out it was the latter.
Interesting, I didn't follow that.
Elon to Matt Taibbi: "You are dead to me."
That was his response to Matt asking if Elon had shadowbanned him, at the start of the feud between Elon and Substack.
https://unherd.com/breaking_news/elon-musk-to-matt-taibbi-youre-dead-to-me/
Don't forget that the fastest way to get your account suspended is to say something bad about Elon Musk.
...elon musk reveals everything about himself with what he does and doesn’t say, what he does and doesn’t do...he is concerned with having kids, but not raising them (no father of five mothers with 10+ children and 4+ business babies has enough time to raise a child)...he is what he always has been, the angry son of a south african diamond miner...an obsessed 12 year old shitposter protected by wealth...overrated but important and petulant...
Is much of the answer to your questions about Musk’s hypocritical silence is: “money talks”? From the cap table to Saudi, to China. His moneyed interests seem to have a higher importance than free speech.
Or he has different standards when it comes to free speech à la four legs good; two legs bad.
I tend to reflexively reject accusations of hypocrisy, because they usually fall into one of two categories: 1) a tu quoque, which is a logical and ad hominem fallacy or 2) (usually-progressive) elevation of fairness to the exclusion of other virtues (see Haidt, The Righteous Mind).
To give this a fair shake, though, I have to ask: Is the issue that he's going after a softer target in the UK that is less likely to fight back, or is he whoring himself out to business interests in these other nations? Or maybe he thinks the UK will listen and hopefully respond, while KSA, Russia, and China surely won't at best, if not tell him "Message Received"?
I would hope that this article isn't a proxy battle over his politics. I'm long CRM but I think Marc Benioff's politics flat out suck.
I suppose he could go after KSA/PRC/Russia, but would that be a fool's errand? And if Musk is not doing a good job of managing Twitter, what exactly should he do differently?
Do you think Musk would criticize the UK if they were arresting people for encouraging violence in the name of Palestine? It's not about Musks politics per se, it's that his free speech mantle seems to be a way to pretend that his ordinary political views are part of the valiant fight for freedom. There's nothing wrong with being partisan, but if your going to claim to be something else you should act like it. Everyone thinks their OWN side should have free speech, real free speech is believing that BOTH sides should have it.
I know he was a journalist but why was Khashoggi killed?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45812399.amp
Surely almost everything in this BBC piece is true. However, while I can’t say for sure, I would be curious if it wasn’t more than him writing mean things that got him killed. I’m not sure the Saudi government has ever spoken to his death and the reasons for it in a detailed way that seems to shed light on what happened there. I’m also not sure how much to trust that the Saudi government or the domestic press would give me the straight facts.
Journalist is a very good cover if you are an intelligence asset since it allows you to set the default framing to you’re being killed only for what you are writing and not, say, which foreign governments you are writing at the behest of. He may have also been up to things you personally would not tolerate as a head of state that have nothing to do with writing at all. Is someone at BBC best friends with MBS? Do they get froyo together? Am I missing something here? Their sources, were these the same people talking about The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island?
When you see news of someone killed, without automatically blaming them, it’s good to ask what they did to get killed so you can at least weigh whether you want to risk the same fate. For instance, I make a point of not hiking through the Hindu Kush as my left leg is lame and they don’t celebrate Shabat. There are profiles for who is more likely to get murdered and who is more likely to get raped. It is just completely taboo to talk about.
Our country murders people all the time (sometimes with extrajudicial drones). My state just executed someone the other day. If he had a Blogspot, the New York Times would have accused Governor Abbot of crimes against humanity. The Times was conspicuously absent on the tragedy of Assange’s treatment or else it took the position that we had afforded him a fate too kind.
Free speech has never existed in totality anywhere. Elon isn’t perfect but surely his budget for hypocrisy seems higher than the previous Dorsey/Gadde regime. He also appears to censor less since he does not appear to grant the Federal government access to muting rogue citizens carte blanche.
I feel bad for Khashoggi but I’m not sure anyone who talks about it has the real scoop.
He may have had ties to intelligence, but it was still bad and is ancillary to my point.
Surely the answer is obvious. He's talking about the UK because the UK is in the news and those other countries aren't. The UK throwing people in prison for posting things on X is:
a) Relatively new (at this scale)
b) Bad for business (the UK is frequently the second largest market for American tech firms after America itself)
c) A bad omen for the USA (which now has a VP candidate who has stated the first amendment doesn't protect hate speech)
Additionally, the UK claims to be a liberal democracy, whereas China and Saudi Arabia specifically don't. These are all legitimate reasons to comment on the situation in the UK, and doesn't make him hypocritical any more than NYT op-eds are hypocritical for not including a global review of every country in the world every time they pass opinion on one of them.
By the way, I grew up in the UK and have family there. I am cheering Musk on. The idea he's meddling is nonsense, Americans comment on the politics of foreign countries all the time and Brits do it even moreso in reverse. Also there is widespread disgust in the UK at what the government is doing, but also a sense of overwhelming helplessness. Labour just won their election (with fewer votes than they got in 2017, when they lost). They're very unpopular already at the start but there's four more years of this, at minimum. And that's assuming that by the time another election happens they haven't simply imprisoned everyone who disagrees with them and formalized state censorship, which appears to be the direction they're going on.
The world is full of countries that were once prosperous and stable until the left took power, often in the last free election they ever had. Argentina and Venezuela remind us of what can go wrong when people vote in the left. Musk is one of the only people with a megaphone calling attention to this situation, and he's a hero for doing so. The man just can't stop doing things right, it's incredible to witness.
Israel, Russia (war and invasion!) have been much more in the news much more than the UK, and yet he’s been mum.
Your last paragraph is a fair point but still gets the question of whether nitpicking liberal democracies over truly authoritarian regimes advances his cause or will backfire.
The war in Ukraine started years ago, Israel's war in Gaza started last year. Neither are in the news for speech issues specifically, which is what Musk cares about the most, seeing as he owns a company that makes money off of speech. And Musk tweeted about Gaza less than 24h ago, so it's not like he only talks about the UK.
I don't think what Musk says will have any impact on the UK or the cause of free speech either way. His actions will and already do, but that's different. Free speech is a strange cause to believe in, because those of us who do believe in it tend to believe that it's both very important, and also that individual opinions don't have much impact. That makes sense if you view speech as primarily about communicating information/facts and aggregating views, rather than a Great Man perspective in which, say, a single historic speech changes the world. If individual speech isn't important then it doesn't make sense to build huge infrastructures to suppress it. If you believe in the power of a single historic speech, then who gets to speak and who has to listen becomes very important, and such societies end up with China-style speech controls.
I am also friends with Joe Norman and I agree with his main point.