Elon Musk's poll regarding Trump's twitter account

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Elon Musk has recently posted a poll to his Twitter account asking his readers if from President Trump's Twitter account ought to be restored. The votes had come back 51.8% in favor of his restoration, 48.2% in opposition. Since over many years censorship on the platform, prior to Musk taking over, was certainly promoting the left and suppressing those likely to support Trump as a politician this result is quite remarkable. No, not everyone voting "yay" was a Trump supporter. But hopefully this poll is a measure of respect for the freedom of speech. And this poll has yielded results that give one true hope - it would look like at least half the people out there in the West do respect that freedom of expression, and the "woke" crowd pushing for censorship and "cancel culture" are a minority - albeit a loud and aggressive one.

Some may think that Trump is an exceptionally objectionable figure, akin to a modern-day Adolf Hitler. However, if you consider yourself a supporter of freedom of expression you can't support it selectively - and, if you asked me, I'd say Hitler deserves it just like anybody else. If Hitler were still alive I'd be OK with him spouting his nonsense - so long as he did it from a maximum security lock-up, of course.

What is also curious is that Musk had collected over 15 million votes on his poll in under 48 hours, if memory serves. Some sarcastic types had compared that with the performance of the US election officials that had expected to take days if not weeks to count the bulletins in the 2022 midterm election. They have a point - I guess once again private business beats the government by a mile here!

References

Reinstate former President Trump (poll) * archive
Elon Musk, 19 November 2022



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7 comments
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I think it's funny that people see Trump as a champion of free speech, when he has so often expressed his belief that speech unfavorable to him should be suppressed. The 'freedom' oriented conservatives and the 'woke' left BOTH want to suppress what other people can say, they just disagree about what should be suppressed.

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Oh, yeah, he is a highly authoritarian type and hardly a libertarian. But he ended up being a test case for how liberal our society is going to be going forward.

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A poll on twitter is usually an indication of consensus among bot-programmers which is usually irrelavant.

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That is a valid concern. But, firstly, I think there are some filters that Musk had put i to drive down the bots' influence, and, secondly, I would imagine that there would be bots on both sides of the divide in this particular instance.

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(Edited)

If I were Trump, I wouldn't have used that account as well as Twitter again.

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