Elon Musk calls himself a “Free Speech Absolutist” but we need to examine what that means.

Some rights impose on another person a corresponding obligation. For an example, my right to life imposes an obligation on others that I should not be killed or denied what’s necessary to keep me alive. I could say a lot more about that but I have another bee in my bonnet at the moment.

One person’s right to free speech doesn’t impose an obligation on anyone else to listen to what they have to say and if we think it’s bullshit we’re exercising our own right to freedom of speech by calling it out as such.

Some comedians, Rowan Atkinson and Stephen Fry come to mind, insist we don’t have right not to be offended and I can understand where they’re coming from – the reason Christmas cracker jokes aren’t funny is that they’re inoffensive – but they actually depend on someone being offended and are actually offended themselves if we don’t find them funny. I won’t belabour the point, it’s a self-contradictory attitude.

The point I’m getting at is Elon Musk’s decision to remove the Block option from X/Twitter. We’re no longer to be allowed to block people who annoy us, although we can still mute them. That’s not good enough!

Musk seems to have abandoned his ridiculous idea of restricting the number of tweets we can read, rather than the number we can post – it would’ve meant we can only read the first few tweets we see, we can’t choose which ones to read because once we’ve read something we can’t unread it! But now he wants to stop us from blocking people who annoy us as if that inhibited their freedom of expression – it doesn’t, they can say what they like as long as I don’t have to listen to them 😠

Musk has gone even further in obliging us to read stuff we don’t like, even if we invest in a blue tick! I’m constantly getting irrelevant responses to my tweets from cryptobots, I have to choose a setting that only allows people I follow to reply – I can’t choose it as a default setting, I have to remember to do it for each tweet. Anyone reading this will know that’s a lot of tweets!

I’ve had problems with a couple of tweets lately. One is from a friend which I’m not able to read as it “may contain sensitive material” despite my settings allowing me to see this if I choose. The other is one that I’ve posted previously and saved as a draft, but I’m no longer able to post it as it has been “identified as being potentially harmful”. There’s no explanation of why an article informing us that people with disabilities are more likely to be homeless could be considered at all harmful.

I believe that the problem lies in the fact that Musk has dismissed most of the content moderators (probably outsourced, overworked and underpaid) and is dependent on bots to save him money. He’s relying on Artificial Intelligence because he lacks real intelligence of his own 😠

Some friends and I would like to set up a collaborative blog, but we’re unable to set up a DM group to discuss it, we have to do that 1-1 which is repetitive and time consuming. We might set up a dedicated email account, but some of my emails take ages to open!

What to do about it? I really don’t know 🤔 I’ve opened an account on Mastodon mikecoulson48@mindly.social but with 26k followers on X/Twitter I can’t migrate easily.