Phil argues that Elon Musk, by banning a bunch of left-wing journalists and ex-journalists for sharing the real-time location of his private jet, is overreacting in a way that undermines his stated commitment to open speech and even-handed rules on Twitter:

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.

Now, a couple of things are worth noting here. One, even Musk has acknowledged that an open-speech ethos does not mean having no content-moderation rules at all. What Twitter should have is a set of clear, ideologically neutral, easily administrable rules against highly specific forms of personal harassment — things like publishing someone’s home address, not just “hurtful words” or “misinformation.” Two, it seems clear that Musk is still working out the rules on the fly (so to speak), which makes it hard to give people notice of what those rules are. Three, I would have no particular objection to a rule against sharing real-time location information, which is different from sharing data about completed flights, although I take Phil’s point that it has been used a lot for real journalism and that it would be hard to apply the same rule to celebrity sightings.

We should, however, also acknowledge that there is something deeper going on here than a “both sides are hypocrites” story. Progressives do not believe in neutral principles of free speech, or really in neutral principles of anything; they will deploy them only when they are weak and need to appeal to power, or when they are strong enough that they can enforce biased rules and then label them “free speech.” The idea that Musk would turn Twitter into a genuine open-speech platform in which progressives are not in control of the levers of enforcement is literally inconceivable and intolerable to people like Keith Olbermann and Aaron Rupar, and they are engaging in a deliberate swarm aimed at personally targeting Musk precisely because they want him to react in ways that allow them to say “see, there is no such thing as free speech.” Acknowledging that agenda is crucial to understanding this whole story.