Look, I f.ucking warned Elon that this is exactly how it would go. It's how it always goes.

Remember Parler? They promised that they would moderate "based off the FCC and the Supreme court of the United States" (a nonsensical statement for a variety of reasons, including that the FCC does not regulate websites). Then, as soon as people started abusing that on the site, they suddenly came out with, um, new rules, including no "posting pictures of your fecal matter."

Or how about Gettr? Founded by a former Trump spokesperson, and funded by a sketchy Chinese billionaire, it promised to be a "free speech" haven. Then it had to ban a bunch of white nationalists for, you know, doing white nationalist shit. Then, suddenly, it started banning anyone who mentioned that the sketchy billionaire funder might actually be a Chinese spy.

And then there's Truth Social. It's also supposed to be all about free speech, right? That's what its pitch man, Donald Trump, keeps insisting. Except, an actual study that compared its content moderation to other sites found that Truth Social's moderation was far more aggressive and arbitrary than any other site. Among the forbidden things to "truth" about on Truth Social? Any talk of the Congressional hearings on January 6th. Much freedom. Very speech.

So, look, it's no surprise that Musk was never actually going to be able to live up to his notoriously fickle word regarding "free speech" on Twitter. I mean, we wrote many, many articles highlighting all of this.

But, really, it would be nice if he didn't then insult everyone's intelligence about this and pretend that he's still taking some principled righteous stand. It would be nice if he admitted that "oh shit, maybe content moderation is trickier than I thought" and maybe, just maybe, "Twitter actually had a really strong and thoughtful trust & safety team that actually worked extremely hard to be as permissive as possible, while still maintaining a website that users and advertisers liked." But that would require an actual ability to look inward and recognize mistakes, which is not one of Elon's strongsuits.

So, last night, after banning a ton of journalist accounts on Twitter, Elon and his Trust & Safety VP, Ella Irwin, tried to defend the decision. But they did so badly. Irwin pushed out a bullshit statement to the media:

"Without commenting on any specific user accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk," Irwin said. "We don't make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts."

Yeah... that's not what people are complaining about. They weren't saying journalists should get special treatment for breaking the rules. They're asking how the f.uck did what these journalists posted break the rules?

Eventually Musk jumped on Twitter, of course, and like Irwin, tried to pretend that they were just making sure the rules applied equally to journalists as to everyone else. Except... that was always the case? The issue was that yesterday, they created new laughably stupid rules to ban an account tweeting publicly available information regarding Elon Musk's jet. Then Musk took it further and claimed that this (again) publicly available information was "assassination coordinates."

Well, except for a few minor details. First, he just f.ucking changed the terms of service to shut down the jet tracker, and made them so broad and vague that tons of tweets would violate the rule - including anyone using Twitter's built-in location indicator to tweet a photo of someone else. Second, the location of his plane is public information. It's not "assassination coordinates." If Musk is worried about getting assassinated, hiding this account isn't going to help, because the assassin will just go straight to the ADS-B source and get the data anyway. Third, I get that Musk claims his child was in a car that was attacked the other night, but there remain some open questions about that story. For example, the location where it occurred, as deduced by BellingCat, was not close to any airport.

Given that, it's not at all clear how this is connected to the jet tracking service. Furthermore, the LAPD put out a statement on this:

LAPD's Threat Management Unit (TMU) is aware of the situation and tweet by Elon Musk and is in contact with his representatives and security team. No crime reports have been filed yet.

Which, you know, seems notable. Because if a stalker actually went after him, you'd think that rather than just posting about it on social media, he might contact the police?

But, most importantly, none of the journalists in question actually posted "real time" assassination coordinates for Musk. They had posted about this whole story having to do with content moderation decisions made by Musk. Hell, one of the journalists, Donie Sullivan, got banned for tweeting that LAPD statement.

So, yeah, it's not about "equal treatment" for journalists. It's about coming up with bullshit arbitrary rules that just so happen to ban the journalists who have been calling out all the dumb shit Elon has been doing. Which, you know, was the kinda thing Elon insisted was the big problem under the last regime, and insisted he was brought in to solve.

Every website that has third party content has to do moderation. Every one. It's how it works. And every website has the right to moderate how they want. That's part of their editorial discretion.

Musk absolutely can make bad decisions. Just like the previous Twitter could (and did). But it would be nice if they f.ucking realized that they're doing the same damn thing, but on a much flimsier basis, and backed by utter and complete nonsense.

So, yeah, they're now saying that if you put your Mastodon bio in your profile, it's malware. Given that, it's a little difficult to believe that this is all just about "public safety" regarding Elon stalkers, and not, perhaps, a little anti-competitive behavior on the part of an increasingly desperate Elon Musk.

Way to support free speech.