Elon Musk created an uproar last night by suspending a slew of prominent accounts that included reporters at the Washington Post and New York Times and the left-wing activist journalist Aaron Rupar, driving fellow journalists to their defense.
Musk’s stated reason was that they were “doxxing” him and putting his family in danger by sharing real-time info speculating on the location of his private jet by looking at flight info, or linking to other sources that were sharing this info.
I can understand why many conservatives are reluctant to come to the defense of some of the worst bullies on Twitter, or rally around journalists who cheered on, defended, or ignored conservatives being banned and news being suppressed (most prominently the Hunter Biden story) under prior ownership. So these people are the most unsympathetic characters ever.
But as hypocritical as it may be for leftist journalists to whine about arbitrary Twitter suspensions, what Musk is doing here is also hypocritical. The true test of whether somebody is an actual champion of open speech is not whether he allows speech he’s more sympathetic to but if he allows speech he finds disagreeable. And so far, Musk is failing that test.
Providing flight information is not the same as doxxing, which involves sharing information such as home addresses, especially when it’s a regular non-celebrity.
It is not an attempted “assassination” to post where a private jet is at any given time. There is plenty of reporting that involves tracking the movements of planes, anything from speculating on the vice-presidential pick to sports reporters trying to determine where a major free agent may sign by airplane movements. No determined assassin needs a Twitter account to highlight publicly available data.
Furthermore, a lot of times gossip reporters or average citizens will spot a celebrity at a bar or restaurant and tweet about it. Is that all considered doxxing too? To me, that’s more actionable than real-time flight info.
Of course, it goes without saying that as the owner of Twitter, a private company, Musk can suspend whomever he wants for whatever reason, or just because he feels like it. But not if he wants to claim to be a champion of open speech. Instead, he will just be banning different people for different sorts of reasons.