Posted BY: The Daily Wire
Twitter CEO Elon Musk said Thursday that he is defining hate speech on the platform based on the definitions that the platform used prior to Musk taking over.
Musk made the revelation in a tweet about how the company has cracked down on hate speech on the platform amid pressure from advertisers and left-wing activists.
“Hate speech impressions down by 1/3 from pre-spike levels,” Musk tweeted. “Congrats to the Twitter team!”
“I have half a mind to wag my finger at the 1500 accounts that caused the spike, but I shall forebear,” Musk continued. “Reducing the max allowed tweets/day to a number below what a speed typist on meth could do was helpful.”
Musk then responded to a question from DailyWire+ host Jordan Peterson about how he defines hate speech.
“This is simply based on the same list of terms that Twitter has used for some time, so ceteris paribus,” Musk responded.
Trending: Return of the Great MAGA King
How do you define hate speech @elonmusk a serious question asked in good faith. https://t.co/RhVjqTEZoC
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) November 24, 2022
Earlier in the day, Musk announced that he was going to grant a mass amnesty to accounts that had been previously banned on the platform.
Musk made the decision in response to the final results of a poll he tweeted Wednesday. The platform will begin unbanning accounts en masse, except for those who broke the law or engaged in excessive spam, next week, he tweeted in response to the results. Musk has already unbanned a number of popular accounts that were permanently suspended before he took over as “Chief Twit.”
On Wednesday, Musk tweeted a poll asking whether or not to unban users that had been permanently suspended. “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” he wrote.
More than three million users voted in the poll, and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of amnesty; nearly three-quarters of voters, 72.4%, voted “yes,” while just 27.6% voted “no.”
“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote after the poll concluded. “Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”
Before the poll ended, Musk seemed to indicate that in effect, the platform would significantly curtail content moderation to target illegal content and increase transparency.
If you had wanted to write a good article on Musk, you would have focussed on:
1. The fact that Musk is using the same criteria identifying ‘hate speech’ that Twitter previously used – thereby completely betraying his promise that Twitter would be a ‘free speech platform’… rather than just casually mentioning that fact in passing.
2. You should also have focussed on the fact that Tusk openly stated in a tweet that ‘negative’ and ‘hate’ speech tweets would be ‘aggressively de-boosted’ – which means, they would be shadow banned…. exactly the insidious and highly effective censorship tool that Tusk said would NOT be used in his ‘free speech platform’!
The fact is that by virtue of these statements by Tusk, what he actually engineering is the ILLUSION of free speech: you can say what you want…. but if they don’t like what you say, then no one will hear you.
This isn’t about democracy, Elon. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees free speech. You shouldn’t be cutting people off because someone hates what they are posting. It’s time to wear your big-boy pants and stop being so WOKE.