Teri Kanefield – “Free Speech Absolutism” – Elon Musk abolished Twitter’s moderation policies and allowed “America’s most prominent Nazi,” Andrew Anglin back onto Twitter along with Donald Trump. He declared himself a “free speech absolutist” and said all voices should be heard. Then, on Thursday, he went on a binge and suspended the Twitter accounts of a number of well-known journalists. He offered a flimsy pretext, claiming that the journalists had told people his family’s location. It was a lie. In fact, they were criticizing him and he didn’t like it. Because Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist and has been criticizing the previous owners of Twitter for banning people and content, people pointed out his hypocrisy—but what he did was worse than that. Max Fisher, an international reporter and columnist for The New York Times, said this about Musk and friends:

“People need to understand how mainstream it has become in some tech vulture capitalist circles to argue that journalism itself is dangerous as an idea and should be abolished and that it will be up to the tech world to carry this out.” “It comes out of a [Silicon] Valley utopianism that has said since the 90s that all legacy institutions are ultimately barriers to progress, but that the enlightened minds of the tech world, guided by the pure science of engineering, will one day liberate us by smashing the old ways.” “The idea of rejecting institutions to build a purer society on the internet, in vogue in tech in the 90s, by the 2010s had become a mandate to abolish and remake those institutions in big tech’s image.”