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.
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...
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."
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
Regardless of the origin, I’d prefer if the comment make an actual claim, instead of just talking about “questions raised”. I wish they’d try to answer the question they detect lol
These shadowban stories are so often just hearsay and anecdotes from random users just feeding weird conspiracy vibes. Never go on a user saying they don't see something, there's too many variables in the mix from their usage patterns to sure, actual weird Elon/X algorithm tweaks at play.
From the last paragraph:
"We don’t have solid proof, but it strongly suggests that X is secretly shadow banning İmamoğlu. I don’t think Elon Musk will change this, but I’m writing this article to show the political power he holds."
Also, most of the accounts tweets only have around 200k impressions, which is much lower than what the old x account(which was banned by the government) used to get.
Also another point, erdogans government is so intolerant of seeing the presidential candidate is that they've literally took down banners and posters that mention anything about him. It is "illegal" to have a banner ad that has the text "Ekrem İmamoğlu" or a photo showing İmamoğlu. Do you really think a government that goes to such extremes won't try and persuade Twitter to shadowban the presidential candidate's x account?
There can be an element of force to how they win but it is not the whole picture.
Have to accept that there are a lot of people with reasons to support these politicians
However, Twitter wasn't instrumental in getting Erdogan elected in 2003.
TV/Radio has been his thing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13746679
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/30/turkey-closes-...
Internet companies (like all companies) can and indeed must choose how they behave. "We follow all laws inside each country" is one such choice, but it's not a special privileged choice that absolves the company of criticism for its behavior.
They took a pretty good stab at it in 1948: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
To be honest, you could restrict your compliance to only the laws of the country you're based in. American companies follow American laws, etc. Then move your company to where you most agree with the laws.
Social media companies aren't gonna take a foreign government to court to arbitrate requests in order to protect a citizen since the law is always on the side of the government as they're the ones making it and enforcing it.
The EU and EU members also tell X to ban certain political topics they dislike under various pretexts, and X always complies without question. Like I was sending a friend from Germany a clip on X of Ukrainian recruiters kidnapping a guy off the street and throwing him in a van but surprise, my friend couldn't watch it as the video was banned in Germany but not in my EU country. What German law was it breaking? I don't know, it didn't say, but it doesn't really matter since any government makes up the speech rules as they go and uses selective enforcement on the basis of "for my friends anything, for my enemies the law" so every government practices its own version of domestic censorship in order to maintain its power.
I like how Elon is so eager to bend his knee to censor requests from authoritarian "friend" governments like India and Turkey
but when the request comes from a supposedly "left-leaning" judiciary like Brazil to suspend accounts that were posting misinformation, suddenly he stands on his principles and defy the orders.
This is a nothing burger.
Shadow-banning opposition voices is a gift to governments that fear open debate, and Musk is complicit.
Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient.
Man, this is true across so much of the political landscape.
"Principles" are what we enforce on others and excuse away for ourselves.
