You'll notice he has not banned them from X.
Free speech does not come without taking legal responsibility for that speech.
Free speech does not come without taking legal responsibility for that speech.
Which ironically means that collectively speech will be more free if you prohibit certain types of it for all. A free society doesn't strictly have to tolerate anti-free-society positions like those of ISIS terrorists or neo-nazis — some (including Karl Popper) would say that a free society that wants to stay free, has a duty to be intolerant towards the intolerant.
Free speech, US-style was never about freedom, it was always about who wields the stick.
So I think it is very likely that applying all the old ideas to a new world will not get us far. But yeah, in the end having people that care enough to do something is always a precondition for keeping a society free.
Where people diverge is when people want to censor, hurt and ideally destroy people who make unpopular but otherwise completely kosher comments. For instance Martin Kulldorff [1] and Jay Bhattacharya [2] are a couple of people who were censored/shadowbanned on old Twitter for expressing opinions about the best way to approach COVID, that were different than the 'official opinion.' One is a Harvard biostatistician, the other is professor of medicine at Stanford.
In general I think anybody should be able to express their opinion, but we live in a society now where even the most qualified cannot freely express themselves when their opinion runs contrary to whatever the official narrative of a time is. That's highly dysfunctional for any society, but words cannot express how stupid this is in a society where freedom of speech has been held as a fundamental value for centuries.
And the biggest threat is not even the overt censorship, but the self censorship that's the endgame goal of censorship. You make an example out of a handful of people, to ensure the other millions keep their mouths shut, in an effort to try to make opinions that made be otherwise widely held, look fringe.
People who are part of LGBTQ community had to self censor themselves for multiple centuries. Victims of sexual harassment had to self censor themselves. Being a free mason means you cannot talk about it public.
As a society, we make rules and norms all the time about what is acceptable and what is not. Unfortunately, we are in midst of a massive cultural change and you can see its effects across all of the society. Eventually, one group will die out and we will have peace of mind again :)
Yes, freedom of speech has been a fundamental value for centuries, that people have unfortunately come to take for granted. In history all of the great causes you might have felt passionately about were able to openly debated and pursued in no small part because Free Speech. Abolitionism, suffrage, equality issues, and so on could all have, and probably would have, been easily censored in a US without Free Speech. And thanks to the US' historic role in advancing near to all knowledge and technology, these ideals that were able to be fostered and grown, also spread across the globe. The world as we know it today would likely look dramatically different had Free Speech not been enshrined within the US.
What you're talking about is something more like the Overton Window [1], which is related, but different.