Here is what the richest man in the world said earlier today, on the platform he intends to acquire:
By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
Elon’s got one thing going for him. He has demonstrated an apparently innate facility to pack more willful and privileged ignorance into a single sentence than almost anyone on the planet.
These statements are so fundamentally wrong — factually, ethically, practically, and in every other way, that I hardly know where to begin.
For one thing, he might want to look at the most elementary descriptions of what constitutes free speech and censorship. Censorship is when state authorities limit the speech of the people under their power. Free speech is the guarantee that no action defined as speech is illegal outside a few harmful examples, like harassment, hate speech and other special cases (under constant negotiation) that we as a society have decided constitute or exacerbate crimes.
But this is an unbelievably complicated and nuanced concept, not a big thick line with censorship on one side of it and gratuitous lack of any restriction on the other. The courts are constantly — as in, at all times in legal history there are huge cases setting new precedents — literally defining and redefining what is meant by “that which matches the law.” We have a whole branch of government whose job it is to interpret the law. There is no simple solution or algorithm or set of hard and fast rules that govern this, and the idea that Elon seems to either assume there is or, propose one be drawn up, is the first sign that he has zero clue what he’s talking about.
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