Billionaire Elon Musk has taken a stab at Twitter by questioning its adherence to the principle of free speech. Creating a poll on his handle, Musk tweeted “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”
To show that the poll was serious he went ahead to quote the tweet with “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully”.
So far there have been 408,231 votes, 65% of which voted ‘No’ showing that the majority of Twitter users do not think that Twitter adheres to the principle of Free speech.
Free speech and Twitter
There have been several reactions from his 79 million Twitter followers with some stating that his account may be suspended while some others are calling for the billionaire to buy Twitter and bring back free speech.
Many of his followers are also referencing the temporary ban of Actress Rose McGowan after she was partially suspended for violating Twitter’s rules and regulations after she tweeted in support of women who had come forward with claims they had been sexually abused by powerhouse Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein.
While others are referencing the Twitter ban of former President Donald Trump stating that if Twitter adhered to free speech, Trump wouldn’t have been suspended, as all he did was post information on his page as he had the right to.
On Donald Trump’s permanent ban, however, there are several speculations as he was also banned on Instagram and Facebook and even the United States Congress tried to moderate his posts by voting for him to censure the racist comments he tweeted on his page.
Wikipedia also reports that his tweets had a hand in inciting the violence that occurred at the United States Capitol during the formal counting of electoral votes. And even before his ban Twitter had either deleted some of his tweets or labelled them as disputed.
After his ban, Trump created his own Twitter-like platform “Truth Social”.
In the world that we live in, free speech has various definitions. What you consider free speech may be hurtful to various groups of people. An opinion could easily be hate speech and for a platform like Twitter to be all-inclusive rules have to be set.
It is important to note that this is not actually a call to boycott Twitter. It is more of a study to determine the opinion of ordinary Twitter users on the app’s rules and laws regarding free speech. What the results of the study would be used for however is still unknown.
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