I am not an Elon or X fan, and I don’t think this is Good, but Twitter’s policy pre-X to comply with national content laws was to geo-block content when a government demanded it be blocked. I don’t recall if the algorithmic shadow-ban was in that toolkit pre-X as well, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Again, I don’t think this is a good outcome, but it’s not substantially at odds with what Twitter pre-Elon would’ve done (I also seem to recall Twitter was very sensitive to employees visiting or living in Turkey - the relationship with the Turkish government had been fraught for years).
Now, if the critique here is that Mr. Free Speech is rolling over and showing his belly to the first autocrat who shows up at his door, yeah, I get that, but it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.
I happened to be in Istanbul during the Gezi Park uprising in 2013.
I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand.
They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising.
Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused.
Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.
After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils".
Keep in mind that Pre-2016 Twitter was markedly looser in enforcement than 2016-2022 Twitter which was increasingly run by legal and moral busybodies sensitive to the fallout of the Arab Spring, and habituated to government pressure (see Twitter Files). If anything, Twitter under Musk is a continuation of that trajectory for Rest-Of-World, but with special exemptions and protections for English language countries and issues in which he and the firm has personal awareness of and popular capital - for example, see how it stands up to the governments of Brazil and UK.
All material facts are correct - but let's also remember that the world in 2013 doesn't exist anymore. In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise. Arab Spring gave people hope. Gezi people were not only protesting, but also enjoying their uprising, singing, dreaming. Today - all of that is gone. Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism. Let alone the number of active wars and conflicts developed countries are perpetrators...
> Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.
I don’t think this is an accurate read. From the outside you don’t really know what they fought or didn’t fight, and why. It is possible Twitter/X chose not to fight certain situations based on prior experience or precedent. But in other cases, post-Musk, they have fought government censorship. For example they continued fighting the government of India even a year after Musk acquired Twitter/X. And they also had a showdown with Brazil’s government, where it was pretty blatantly violating Brazil’s own constitution.
Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies but turns a blind eye to every autocracy on the planet engaging in far more insidious censorship. Worse he will genuflect towards those autocrats. Interesting.
“Elon” is not fighting something. He is implementing a policy. In countries where the law protects free speech, Twitter/X fights illegal orders that try to coerce them into censorship. That happens to be freer societies. But authoritarian ones that have very clear laws enabling censorship, they follow the local law. That’s not genuflecting but just sticking to a principled approach that avoids them being outright banned in those countries.
>Elon fights UK, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and other democracies
Care to share the sources that Elon fought those countries? Because the Wikipedia list of Twitter censorship shows that X complied with the majority requests from those countries.
I got off the bandwagon of old Twitter when they decided to respond to the US electing a Twitter troll President not by enforcing their own policy, but by modifying that policy to create a narrow carve-out of "newsworthiness" for a specific account that could then, more or less, disregard their policies wholesale.
New Twitter is worse, but the Twitter of the past had no real spine either.
Can you source this claim because Twitter turned a lot of heads when it didn't comply with content restrictions elsewhere in the Mediterranean and faced website blocks (that they retained Moxie to help circumvent)...
This is definitely not the first time post-Elon that Twitter has continued the practice of following foreign requests. AFAIK they only pushed back on Brazil when what the government requested was particularly aggressive, not unlike when Facebook pushed back against Brazil back in the day and similarly got a daily fine for not following through.
Twitter regularly banned political figures globally following government pressure. X is more consistent in applying bans regionally rather than banning accounts from the platform entirely. Post-acquisition they've expressed that they choose to do that because they deem it to be preferable to having the entire network banned in certain countries. It probably has more to do with the financial incentives than with a value judgement, but either way there's no reasonable alternative, so I find it disingenuous to frame it as evidence of Musk's dishonesty, regardless of the fact that there are other instances where moderation policies were changed arbitrarily that actually do constitute evidence of that. I understand that some people flag any comment that isn't sufficiently critical of Musk and his companies regardless of their validity, which makes it tempting to parenthesize any "softball" comment to express loyalty to the tribe, but with regards to their compliance with government censorship it's unwarranted.
imo the bigger talking point is that Twitter post-acquisition has been working pathetically to curb organic buzzes in favor of manufactured trends, even harder than its previous left-leaning management. Effect of that being observed in Turkish politics is a downstream issue to that.
Twitter's strict "fun wins" algorithm of past seem like it had been a major driver in e.g. Arab Spring.
Old Twitter was selective in what countries it would take orders from because it would consult with the administration on a weekly basis and be told what to do. Social media explicitly changed their policies to allow for the advocacy of violence against Russians (only), which is insane.
I have no idea how people could delude themselves into thinking that was a better situation, especially during a Trump presidency that has been deporting and excluding people for speech, but it's impossible to understand the movement Democrat's value system at any particular moment.
It's of course sad that we have to rely on Mr. Free Speech Oligarch in order to debate subjects from positions that consistently poll majorities of the electorate, but I'd rely on China, Russia and Iran to talk about my problems with the US government, too. They openly hate free speech, they just support the freedom of that sort of speech (until the US likes them again.) It's the US that is desperate to abandon what is almost literally its Prime Directive and main differentiator from the rest of the world. We are popularly sovereign. We are not ruled by God through His current anointed representative bloodline, with a Parliament as a customary intermediary (which is actually a frozen conflict.)
How many years are we away from a POTUS directly passing rule to their child or spouse? We've gotten awfully close multiple times in the past couple decades. Will Democrats finally be happy that dumb people don't get to vote anymore? Do we pass from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire again, propelled by the righteous complaints of slaves and farmers about a decadent, narcissistic, do-nothing elite?
> it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.
Not just at this point, and not just Twitter - slanting algorithms and bans for political ends is common practice, it's just usually a little more subtle:
1993-1997 US secretary of Labor Robert Reich: Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms. Someone should remind him that they're private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. - https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296
Elon has bragged about shadow banning posts in the interview with don lemon. Apparently twitter has been the most important public town square… to manipulate. Thank you.
Which interestingly was almost exclusively far right accounts. He shadow banned 3-4 and kicked a few others off X premium (so they don't get paid for tweets). Which X claimed was for spamming him and others after they disagreed with him over supporting H1B visas. But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
>But he's definitely not a neutral actor so who knows.
Which other billionaire media moguls are neutral actors? Rupert Murdoch? Ted Turner? Jeff Bezos?
None of them are, because the value of media is based on its ability to control public opinion and influence elections. Otherwise none of the guys I mentioned at the top would be in that business.
"If you don't follow media you're uninformed, if you do you're misinformed."
The Turkish government definitely has a hand in this situation. Otherwise, I think the fact that I see almost no posts from an account that has notifications enabled and that I follow indicates a flawed algorithm. I congratulate the friend who shared this post. He touched on a very nice, detailed topic...
Possibly but also plausible that they just do it anyway. The post-acquisition Twitter "shadowban" a lot of contents and users in-organically and algorithmically in their attempt to change its content-novelty-meritocracy culture into cash based influence economy, with not significant, but not at all negligible, successes.
They won elections for years with a puppet candidate. Now there is no puppet candidate, and they want to block this one by using all the power of the state.
Not the first time this has happened. It’s very strange. Elon is willing to risk breaking the laws of the EU, Brazil and the UK yet caters to Turkish law with seemingly no resistance whatsoever.
He knows authoritarian countries will order what they want and that’s it, so he simply comply. But for democracies where power is more diffuse, he can afford to make a show and try to shift public opinion to whatever he wants, defying the State as much as possible.
Is it? X just follows the country’s applicable laws right?
Also the EU is not exactly innocent or a better authority - see the interference recently in Romania’s elections, where they literally annulled the votes cast by citizens, banned a candidate, and reran the elections so they would get the desired result.
I continue to be skeptical of hanging hopes for 'free speech' on expecting free-as-in-beer, ad-supported, privately owned websites to actively promote the things that you write.
Irrespective of how Musk's overall social media posturing portrays "free speech" -- X is the only one whose speech matters and they are apparently choosing to 'speak' in ways that don't support him. They are technically doing this guy a favor by letting him post on their site in the first place, and in an algorithmic timeline it is impossible to justify how much reach his posts "should" have vs. how much they do have.
If someone wants to post their speech, they should do so on their own website that they pay for and control. They should purchase advertising if they're not satisfied with their traffic. Thwarting those things -- now that's unethical government censorship, which one can justifiably be mad about. Depending on the government in question it may or may not be unconstitutional.
Relying on X or Meta or whomever to distribute your speech just because there's some vague notion of non-interference in speech on such platforms in the countries where they're based is foolish when you live somewhere else with different laws. Even if the US constitution had some draconian provision to force X to promote his speech, that can't really protect him in Turkiye where the government can just block X.
It's possible to simultaneously believe that private companies should have control over what messages are shown on their own platform while also believing that exerting such control can be negative to the world.
It's the same reason libel and defamation laws exist: someone realized that countries operate better when spreading falsehoods to tarnish a party is illegal, and so laws exist to influence public discourse.
How is purchasing advertisement any more safe from free speech suppression than posting on X/Twitter, Instagram or similar? You're still subject to algorithms, and because advertisment goes through a private entity, they can instil arbitrary restrictions with some amount of effort.
- Purchasing advertising can be done from a variety of actors not just a couple social media platforms.
- As a customer of an ad network or media property or whatever, you either get what you pay for and are happy, or you can go to another one. I totally expect there are arbitrary restrictions imposed by some. But advertising is more of a commodity. And I don't mean to suggest online ads are the only choice.
Article points out that this politician has actually been banned from billboards (which is literally censorship) but I just don't see "Internet" as automatically fixing things like that. Yes, governments can ban people for ridiculous reasons. We were naïve to ever believe that "Internet" would be a trump card for any such nefarious government activity. We live in nations. Nations have power. In some cases people have legitimately chosen a leader whose value system runs counter to our ideals, but that's still democracy working as intended. In other cases, despots take that power in unfair ways. In either case though, "Internet," and especially private social media sites, are not a serious "solution" to anything. The sooner people understand that the better off we'll be.
Readit News
Now, if the critique here is that Mr. Free Speech is rolling over and showing his belly to the first autocrat who shows up at his door, yeah, I get that, but it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.
I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand.
They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising.
Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused.
Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.
After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils".
X’s own figures (as cited by Human Rights Watch) show 86% compliance with government requests from Turkey in 2024 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social...).
Compare that to pre-Musk times, where Twitter complied with Turkish court orders ~25% of the time (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURK...).
Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.
I don’t think this is an accurate read. From the outside you don’t really know what they fought or didn’t fight, and why. It is possible Twitter/X chose not to fight certain situations based on prior experience or precedent. But in other cases, post-Musk, they have fought government censorship. For example they continued fighting the government of India even a year after Musk acquired Twitter/X. And they also had a showdown with Brazil’s government, where it was pretty blatantly violating Brazil’s own constitution.
This is ironic on a posting discussing shadow bans.
Dead Comment
Care to share the sources that Elon fought those countries? Because the Wikipedia list of Twitter censorship shows that X complied with the majority requests from those countries.
It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff.
Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.
New Twitter is worse, but the Twitter of the past had no real spine either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Ara...
Deleted Comment
Twitter's strict "fun wins" algorithm of past seem like it had been a major driver in e.g. Arab Spring.
I have no idea how people could delude themselves into thinking that was a better situation, especially during a Trump presidency that has been deporting and excluding people for speech, but it's impossible to understand the movement Democrat's value system at any particular moment.
It's of course sad that we have to rely on Mr. Free Speech Oligarch in order to debate subjects from positions that consistently poll majorities of the electorate, but I'd rely on China, Russia and Iran to talk about my problems with the US government, too. They openly hate free speech, they just support the freedom of that sort of speech (until the US likes them again.) It's the US that is desperate to abandon what is almost literally its Prime Directive and main differentiator from the rest of the world. We are popularly sovereign. We are not ruled by God through His current anointed representative bloodline, with a Parliament as a customary intermediary (which is actually a frozen conflict.)
How many years are we away from a POTUS directly passing rule to their child or spouse? We've gotten awfully close multiple times in the past couple decades. Will Democrats finally be happy that dumb people don't get to vote anymore? Do we pass from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire again, propelled by the righteous complaints of slaves and farmers about a decadent, narcissistic, do-nothing elite?
Not just at this point, and not just Twitter - slanting algorithms and bans for political ends is common practice, it's just usually a little more subtle:
Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-milita...
On Facebook, Comments About ‘Whites,’ ‘Men,’ And ‘Americans’ Will Face Less Moderation - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-face...
Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts - https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-...
Emi Palmor, the former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice is on Facebook's oversight board - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor
1993-1997 US secretary of Labor Robert Reich: Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms. Someone should remind him that they're private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. - https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296
Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy - https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-fa...
Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages - https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025
Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...
YouTube: Keeping Americans in the Dark on Islam - https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-am...
PPC candidate banned from Facebook and public debates - https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/143384506948066510...
Website critical of Joe Biden banned by reddit, and even banned from private messages on Facebook - https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_f...
Facebook Prevents Sharing New York Post Story on Black Lives Matter Founder Patrisse Cullors' Real Estate - https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-...
Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News - https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
Reporter: Facebook using ex-CIA to decide misinformation policy is ‘very, very worrying’ - https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-e...
Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...
How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
Which other billionaire media moguls are neutral actors? Rupert Murdoch? Ted Turner? Jeff Bezos?
None of them are, because the value of media is based on its ability to control public opinion and influence elections. Otherwise none of the guys I mentioned at the top would be in that business.
"If you don't follow media you're uninformed, if you do you're misinformed."
Deleted Comment
Also the EU is not exactly innocent or a better authority - see the interference recently in Romania’s elections, where they literally annulled the votes cast by citizens, banned a candidate, and reran the elections so they would get the desired result.
Irrespective of how Musk's overall social media posturing portrays "free speech" -- X is the only one whose speech matters and they are apparently choosing to 'speak' in ways that don't support him. They are technically doing this guy a favor by letting him post on their site in the first place, and in an algorithmic timeline it is impossible to justify how much reach his posts "should" have vs. how much they do have.
If someone wants to post their speech, they should do so on their own website that they pay for and control. They should purchase advertising if they're not satisfied with their traffic. Thwarting those things -- now that's unethical government censorship, which one can justifiably be mad about. Depending on the government in question it may or may not be unconstitutional.
Relying on X or Meta or whomever to distribute your speech just because there's some vague notion of non-interference in speech on such platforms in the countries where they're based is foolish when you live somewhere else with different laws. Even if the US constitution had some draconian provision to force X to promote his speech, that can't really protect him in Turkiye where the government can just block X.
It's the same reason libel and defamation laws exist: someone realized that countries operate better when spreading falsehoods to tarnish a party is illegal, and so laws exist to influence public discourse.
- As a customer of an ad network or media property or whatever, you either get what you pay for and are happy, or you can go to another one. I totally expect there are arbitrary restrictions imposed by some. But advertising is more of a commodity. And I don't mean to suggest online ads are the only choice.
Article points out that this politician has actually been banned from billboards (which is literally censorship) but I just don't see "Internet" as automatically fixing things like that. Yes, governments can ban people for ridiculous reasons. We were naïve to ever believe that "Internet" would be a trump card for any such nefarious government activity. We live in nations. Nations have power. In some cases people have legitimately chosen a leader whose value system runs counter to our ideals, but that's still democracy working as intended. In other cases, despots take that power in unfair ways. In either case though, "Internet," and especially private social media sites, are not a serious "solution" to anything. The sooner people understand that the better off we'll be.
think on this