My take:
This happens just as another Tesla factory in China opens. Anyone who thought buying Twitter (now X corp) is about some free speech absolutism lives in a fantasy world. Musk has Teslas to sell (and make). CCP can single-handedly take away the 2nd biggest market and expropriate all IP from factories, and they know he owns Twitter.
Also, nah, free speech absolutism starts with removing algorithmic feed and stopping profiting from ads. By not having the guts to do that Musk already proved himself not a free speech absolutist. This incident is just icing on the cake.
But still I have to ask, those countries that themselves do not have free speech and do not allow their own citizens to read Twitter but spend big bucks on information war against the west? You see amplifying their content and giving it the same weight as regular personal accounts as free speech absolutism?
Imagine you removed all rules on people behavior and make it free for all, except some people have bare hands and a knife while others have tanks and rocket launchers. Ask yourself, is it absolute freedom? Freedom for whom exactly?..
> free speech absolutism starts with removing algorithmic feed and stopping profiting from ads
if you can't make money off it, the platform will cease to exist. its cherry picking to say that something isn't perfect because of this when its the same as everything else on the internet.
charge for it, if it's good people will pay
> you claiming that government accounts are amplified is a strawman
no, read the article, it is about that
> Platform Use Guidelines on state-affiliated accounts stated, “In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people.” By 23:39 GMT that evening, however, Twitter had removed this sentence from its platform policy
and then they removed those labels altogether
The opposite can be seen in Kurt Vonnegut's 2081