The free speech absolutism of free speech absolutist Elon Musk, cont’d
By 
I am beginning to think that people who think that people who thought Elon Musk bought Twitter because he cared about “free speech” are the biggest suckers in known human history:
Again, this shouldn’t be a surprise, even though the irony is super thick. Early Twitter Files revealed that Twitter had long used visibility filtering to limit the spread of certain accounts. Musk screamed about how this was horrible shadowbanning… but then proceeded to use those tools to suppress speech of people he disliked. And now he’s using the tool, at max power, to hide Taibbi and the very files that we were (falsely) told “exposed” how old Twitter shadow banned people.
This is way more ironic than the Alanis song.
So, yes, we went from Taibbi praising Elon Musk for supporting free speech and supposedly helping to expose the evil shadowbanning of the old regime, and refusing to criticize Musk on anything, to Taibbi leaving Twitter, and Musk not just unfollowing him but shadowbanning him and all his Twitter Files.
In about 48 hours.
Absolutely incredible.
Just a stunning show of leopard face eating.
Not much happened then on Sunday, though Twitter first added a redirect on any searches for “substack” to “newsletters” (what?) and then quietly stopped throttling links to Substack, though no explanation was given. And as far as I can tell, Taibbi’s account is still “max deboosted.”
Anyway, again, to be clear: Elon Musk is perfectly within his rights to be as arbitrary and capricious as he wants to be with his own site. But can people please stop pretending his actions have literally anything to do with “free speech”?
As with his and Taibbi’s hero Donald J. Trump, the closest Musk has to a redeeming virtue is how thoroughly he humiliates his most servile lickspittles. If you interviewed Tabbi today he’d still probably refuse to say anything negative about Elon because he really thinks that anybody is ever going to give a shit about the TWITTER FILES, one of the most boring and error-riddled nothingburgers in “journalism” history. Sad, but also deeply hilarious.
…What a hack:
Musk shares, then deletes, DMs with handpicked fake journalist Matt Taibbi.
Just a few weeks ago Taibbi denied Musk was his source for his compromised “Twitter files.” Most reasonable people thought Taibbi was lying at the time. This seems to further support that conclusion. pic.twitter.com/gni187RZkC— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) April 10, 2023
Major optics issue indeed!