ExTwitter Suspends Reporter For ‘Manipulation And Spam’ Hours After Publishing An Article About ‘Manipulation And Spam’ On ExTwitter

from the free-speech-means-only-speech-elon-likes dept

Writer Séamas O’Reilly published his weekly column at the Irish Examiner on Saturday, talking about how spam, scams, and manipulation attempts are flooding the internet. It’s a good article and well worth reading, basically just talking about the proliferation of nonsense online, much of which includes scammers trying to steal money from people. Here’s just a snippet:

This has created what has become known as The Dead Internet; huge swathes of the web comprised entirely of bots, often talking to each other, in a never-ending churn of contentless garbage which may now outnumber the population of actual humans.

Sometimes, the mask slips. If, for example, the language modeller OpenAI is incapable of fulfilling a task, it returns the message ‘sorry, I cannot generate the requested content as it violates OpenAI’s use case policy’. 

Doing a search for that term returns tens of thousands of accounts, posts, products, reviews, listings and personal websites — all fake, and growing in number every day. 

The piece isn’t really about ExTwitter, but among the many things it mentions is ExTwitter, in noting that in response to an earlier column O’Reilly had written, a bluecheck scammer replied to the column being posted there, pushing people to pay for porn videos:

Sometimes, the effects are merely comical. Last week’s edition of this column was an explainer on the Stormont deadlock, on the eve of its being broken by the DUP. 

Now, I will admit I considered this a perfectly lucid and entertaining bit of writing, but an X user was so moved by its analysis that she replied, immediately, with a payment link to videos of her porn.

Such tactics are not new, of course, but they are much more regular than they were even a year ago, having been granted greater license by slack regulation. 

To take the above incident as just one example, that scam bot had a blue check mark, meaning that, unlike me, it pays money every month to Elon Musk’s vastly indebted and unprofitable platform, a situation which would greatly disincentive his company taking proactive measures to weed them out. 

That’s the entirety of the mention of ExTwitter. But, within a few hours, O’Reilly found that his own account on ExTwitter had been permanently suspended for spam and manipulation.

Very free speech, much absolutism.

Now, again, Elon has every right to remove anyone he wants from his platform for violating the rules, and since it’s his site he gets to both decide the rules and what violates them. I’m not arguing that he’s done anything wrong here.

But it does seem a bit hypocritical of him, does it not? He insists that he took over the site to bring back everyone who was suspended (and has brought back all sorts of nonsense peddlers, and has been fine with all sorts of bigotry). But, someone calls him out, and bam, they’re gone.

Filed Under: elon musk, free speech, manipulation, seamas o’reilly, spam

Companies: irish examiner, twitter, x