Elon Musk has promised to give us all back our twatter accounts. Whether he will actually do this remains to be seen, but the promise was made publicly.
Myself I had a very measured reaction to this information. The best case scenario would be Musk gives us all our accounts back and they change the rules to make everything but spam, sexual content, and explicit threats of violence completely free of censorship.
The worst case scenario would be Musk not bothering with the uncensoring of oven’d accounts. A close second would be him uncensoring everyone, but keeping the arbitrary censorship in place so we can go right back to being censored again. Somewhere in the middle, and what I anticipated would happen, is them implementing a censorship policy that is bad, but mostly objectively enforced. This would still be good for us, since it would get tons of antifas kicked off the platform, and any objective content guidelines can be worked around by us and used to say what is needed to be said.
This appears to have already started. I’ve seen numerous examples of antifas whining about other antifa accounts being censored, and Justice Report wrote a great piece about CSAM being finally banned only after Musk took over.
Musk himself has commented on the necessity of banning these people, and has explicitly stated that the old Twatter was selectively enforcing the terms of service, something he does appear to be rectifying.
In exchange, it appears that there will be seemingly harsher rules about censorship. According to Ian Miles Cheong, there is a new policy that twatter is implementing, where you can’t deny a violent event. How they will define a violent event is up for debate, but as long as the rules are fairly enforced this is still a big win for us. Remember, we were arbitrarily censored for being effective, so having explicit rules to abide by, while not ideal, is still a net positive. Having said that, I have reason to believe that Cheong is wrong.
Before I get into that, I do need to point out how difficult it was to find the guys account. Searching “Ian Miles Cheong,” just gave people talking about him, and not his account.
This was true even when I expanded the “people,” part of the results. The second result is a parody account, and none of these are the real guy. This is extremely weird, because the real man’s account is the one with the most followers by far. It looks like a bit of shadowbanning that has been kept in place, at least for now.
So I have my doubts as to the validity of Ian Miles Cheong’s assertion that this is some new policy brought in by Musk. This tweet from the summer of 2021 explicitly states that the denial of violent events where privileged groups were the alleged victims. Cheong does not provide a source for his claim that this is a new policy, and, again, if this is objectively enforced there are plenty of ways to turn this around on our enemies.
