Limits
So even Elon Musk has a limit.
Elon Musk, Twitter’s chief executive, said late Thursday that Kanye West would be suspended from Twitter after the rapper and fashion designer tweeted an image of a swastika inside the Star of David. Mr. Musk said the post violated the social media outlet’s rule against the incitement of violence.
…
The indefinite Twitter suspension happened on the same day that [West] had appeared on a podcast hosted by the Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones, during which he told Mr. Jones, “I like Hitler.”
Speaking of Alex Jones, he’s just declared bankruptcy. I’m wondering if he’ll be able to go right on “hosting” Infowars while not paying the victims of his sadism what the court ruled he owes them.
Before his suspension, [West] had also tweeted an unflattering photograph of Mr. Musk being hosed down on a yacht.
“This is fine,” Mr. Musk tweeted in response to the image. “This is not,” he wrote in regard to the swastika post, confirming [West’s] suspension.
Speaking of names, I knew one of West’s children was named North, haw haw haw, but I didn’t know there were four and all four have joke names. The other three are Psalm, Chicago, and Saint. What a horrible thing to do to your own kids.
Re Jones, the interesting possibility is that his creditors (meaning largely the Sandy Hook parents) could end up owning the Infowars IP, mailing lists, etc. Then what do they do? Continue to operate so the money flows in, or shut it down? The latter possibility probably wouldn’t stop Jones from starting up a new brand and podcast (I’m sure whatever contracts exist between Jones and his shell companies are Jones-friendly).
As the NYT article notes, while this latest bankruptcy filing may delay things, it also opens Jones’s finances up to a lot more scrutiny, and my guess is the bankruptcy courts are not going to be as patient as those state courts were in bringing down the hammer if he doesn’t cooperate with his disclosure obligations.
Musk is of course within his rights to ban Kanye for any or no reason. Claiming the tweet is incitement to violence (in the context of US law) is a nonsense though. He should have gone with the previous justification. Problem is that would highlight the number of openly anti-Semitic and racist accounts that have recently been reinstated.
Rob:
Yeah, Elon’s announced “rule” that Twitter would only ban illegal content was unworkable from the get-go even if it was sincere. This Techdirt explainer sums it up pretty well.
Of course, it’s pretty clear that all along, Elon’s only real guiding post has been “I’ll ban the shit I don’t like, and allow the stuff I like or just don’t care about.” Which is a perfectly fine way to run a blog comments section, but it doesn’t scale well to a massive social media platform, especially when you fire a huge chunk of the staff. (Oh, but of course we’ve been assured that all those staff were just DEI consultants who do nothing….)
Maybe Kanye will reconsider buying Parler in light of this. He could make it into the next Truth Social.
God, imagine owning Infowars. What a horrible fate for people who’ve already had a horrible fate.
It might give them a lot of power. Depending on how the bankruptcy shakes out, they could “buy” it using their claims against the bankrupt entity (that would otherwise go unsatisfied), and then essentially shut it down, or turn the assets into a sort of anti-disinformation site. I believe something like that happened once to a hate site that got turned over to a civil rights group; it was discussed on a recent episode of Ken White and Josh Barro’s “Serious Trouble” podcast.
Again, that wouldn’t shut Jones up. He could start all over again. But it would take him a little time to rebuild his empire I think.
Well that would be a tiny fragment of poetic justice.
They might also be able to claim the copyrights to all his old episodes–giving them the ability to A: Remove his old shit from the internet; B: Put up edited segments with interspersed bits breaking down the lies and vile beliefs underpinning his rants; C: Sue the hell out of any of Jones’ loyal minions who put up unedited copies of the same videos. It’s not nothing.
By chance, I was just reading Max Cutler’s book ‘Cults.’ There’s an essay on the flying saucer nuts of ‘Raelism.’ And their chosen symbol was the mogen david/swastika that ‘Ye’ used. Even they weren’t crazy enough not to modify it after the public reacted.