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I feel a strong desire to steel man this decision by Twitter. While the obvious "Elon hypocrisy!" applies here to some degree, based on the discussions so far, I think many have forgotten or don't understand what Elon's goal for Twitter is: A well functioning time square for proper discourse (to make it look more like the Motte perhaps?). I believe Elon bought Twitter cause he saw the potential for Twitter to be a powerful center for civic discourse, but thought that its previous management's propensity for censorship and allowance of bots to run wild failed to provide the platform to have good civic discourse.
I want to emphasize it again: Elon wants to make Twitter into a place with better civic discourse and engagement. Think the Motte, but at scale.
And while at first glance, this censorship runs counter to his sub-goal of free speech, but I think it does facilitate better civic discourse on the platform. As a hypothetical, if someone replies to a post on the motte with "Check out my Facebook!" It doesn't add anything to the conversation, at best it's nothing, at worst it sidetracks good conversation. And the same applies to Twitter. So this change doesn't strike me as being antithetical to Elon's main goal here based on my understanding of his goals are.
I think you're being too charitable. I do not see any reason to think he's particularly principled in what he sees as "a well functioning time square for proper discourse", I think he simply rejects the biases that the old owners had. Regardless of what he says, he has not been at all clear about what is okay or not okay (he said he wouldn't ban the jet tracker, then did so). He said Jones couldn't come back because his own child died, so he couldn't tolerate people using the death of children for political gain. This is not any position you'd hear endorsed on themotte, because the reason for banning Jones would come down to his willingness to engage in good-faith without preaching, not about the particulars of what he is preaching about.
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It would only be a problem if someone did this over and over. I think this rule is too vague to be useful. Twitter already has anti-spam measures to prevent this.
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I don't really think you can square the vision of Elon as particularly ideological (for free speech, technolibertarianism or whatever else) with a lot of the revealed policy decisions, and this includes actions and positions before the Twitter acquisition. At the end of the day, he's just not a particularly ideologically committed person. He'd like to be seen as such, and post-rationalises a lot of his decisions in that frame, but the underlying interests just seem like the usual, not-very-deep collection of personal and material.
This isn't a case of Elon setting a new policy, and then the policy being enforced. Elon's hitting the button himself after some personal slight or bad experience and then the policy is hastily written after the fact. See elonjet or the various journos getting knocked off (even taking spaces itself down). Before this, look at the breaking point for him on Covid policies (e.g. shutting down his factories), or with Trump's council of advisors, or his unwillingness to extend his supposed free speech principles to criticisms of China. Hell, he's now picking up the crusade against the independence of the federal reserve -- which he'll wrap in some principle or another but really comes down to the dire serviceability of the Twitter debt.
The main reason he initially bought Twitter wasn't altruistic, it was because the company was stagnant and overstaffed and had leadership that was largely content with that. For various reasons, Elon's succeeded in wringing significantly more productivity per dollar out of expensive tech talent in other domains. Now it turns out he's massively overpaid and is looking to offload shares at the original purchase price to various MENA autocrats.
I think it was a giant joke and then he realized he would actually be forced to buy it.
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I think this steelman is hard to square with the part of the policy that says they'll ban you just for having the link in your Twitter bio.
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This idea is so poorly thought out I think it will be reversed soon
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Ok, I'll admit, I didn't realize it was that severe a block. That is definitely going overboard on the block, if it was simply posts that had the appearance of: Follow me on Facebook at: foo_profile. Then I think my argument stands. You are absolutely right, that the restriction as currently implemented kills the ability to post content that might have substantive information from entering the discourse from one of the given sources and that is certainly too far a ban.
If my model of Elon's vision for Twitter is accurate, then this overreaching implimentation can potentially be explained by a lack of resources from Twitter right now. And will later be scaled back into something more reasonable on a per post level by implementing AI anomaly detection to pick up flagrant posts that are antithetical to good discourse.
If I'm not correct, well I'll be sad cause a Motte style discussion board at the scale of Twitter sounds like a dream. And I'd have to do some serious re-tuning on my model of Elon Musk.
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