In addition to the ongoing hilarity of Elon Musk's attempts to stop people from making fun of him by turning the verification process into an unverifiable NFT that ended up costing brands billions of dollars in stock value through grassroots PR manipulations — it seems that Nü Twitter has also been censoring some articles that criticized Elon Musk and his ownership of Twitter.
From Mediaite:
Twitter deemed a Mediaite article that is critical of the company's new owner Elon Musk as "potentially spammy" on Friday night, and diverted users to a warning page when they click the post.
The warning had been removed as of Saturday morning after multiple media outlets – including this one – reported on it.
[…]
Twitter users who clicked on the article in their timelines were taken to a page telling them the link violates the company's URL policy and that it may be "unsafe."
"The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter's URL Policy," the message read. "This link could fall into any of the below categories…"
In addition to the obvious overall irony of Elon Musk claiming to care about "free speech" (read: his privileged individual right to misgender people and say racist shit without being criticized), it's worth noting that this is also essentially the same sort of censorship that befell the New York Post's early reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal*. And to be fair, that was a dumb idea on the part of Twitter (and Facebook, et al)! Yet somehow, I don't think that Elon Musk's Twitter censoring Elon Musk's Twitter for criticizing Elon Musk's Twitter is going to become a constant topic of high-profile right-wing punditry for the next two years.
Remember, folks: parody on Twitter is bad even though Twitter itself is a parody of itself.
Twitter Flags Mediaite Post Critical of Elon Musk as 'Potentially Spammy' [Michael Luciano / Mediaite]
*I'm not saying that there was actually any information of value in the Post's reporting on the laptop, nor that the decision to publish the information was made in good faith; but rather, that the decision to censor a story that was essentially a nothingburger, in some (supposedly) overly-cautious effort to avoid amplifying propaganda or disinformation, was not a great choice!
