In response to Elon Musk’s recent wave of Twitter censorship, Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin sounds the alarm. He claims that the site’s recent blitz of account bans leads it down “the path to totalitarianism.”
Buterin commented on a post praising Elon Musk and claimed that Musk was using a tactic he calls “central planning as overfitting,” whereby he develops regulations that “seem to refit around Elon’s ideas on particular instances.”
Musk’s decision to block the accounts @ElonJets, which records Elon’s aircraft, and @CelebJets, which tracks private celebrity jets, sparked the most recent round of censorship concerns. Such bot trackers retrieve publicly accessible data and rebroadcast it, which is permitted in the United States.
Elon’s content moderation decisions so far:
– no swastikas
– no continuous real-time doxxingWhat’s the problem?
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) December 16, 2022
But Musk went a step further and banned Jack Sweeney‘s account, the guy who created the Elon Jets Twitter bot, seeing it as a threat to his safety and privacy. Then, shortly after, Musk promptly put into effect a new Twitter policy that prohibits “any tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location,” except “a crisis scenario to aid with humanitarian operations or about public engagement events.”
Despite Musk’s earlier declaration that he would not outlaw Sweeney’s tracking account in the spirit of “free speech,” the prohibitions represent a backpedaling move to restrict live location sharing.
Buterin disagreed with the argument made by another user that Musk was merely “responding to system inputs” by quickly banning these tracking accounts.
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The road to dictatorship is taking action “immediately and aggressively in reaction to stimuli” when it involves outlawing items, Buterin claimed.
Buterin also blasted Musk for blocking links to Mastodon, a rival social networking platform, calling the action “very awful.” Although Mastodon’s official Twitter account was also suspended for posting links to its version of the “ElonJet” account, it is unclear why links to Mastodon are currently prohibited.
A response from Twitter did not immediately meet Decrypt’s request for comment.
This is really bad imo pic.twitter.com/y69hqIfq1S
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 16, 2022
Twitter users don’t seem to favor banning accounts for publishing already-public user locations. 59% of respondents to a poll Musk organized, with nearly 3.1 million votes total, said such statements should be unbanned “immediately,” not in a week as Elon Musk had recommended.
Which type of Twitter does Buterin favor? One that doesn’t censor competitor sites and tries to be objective rather than using personal biases and experiences.
Buterin stated, “Good policy should be decided first behind a curtain of ignorance and then applied second.”
Additionally, he recommended that Twitter notify users one month before implementing any new content control policies.
Despite the increased harm that arises from that approach, banning things should be done gradually and with many speed bumps, Buterin added.
Buterin does not necessarily favor tracking celebrity jets, even though he is opposed to hasty and fast Twitter bans.
Buterin expressed concern that the decision-making process behind these bans “veers too near to the sort of acts of the old Twitter administration that people rightfully protested against.”
Actually I have a lot of sympathy for much stricter social norms around leaving people including celebrities alone in peace. In my ideal world, Elon’s jet would very much *not* be publicly trackable.
The concern is that the style of decision making in these bans…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 16, 2022
Buterin has previously criticized prominent global individuals for acting in an authoritarian manner. Buterin made clear his opposition to Nayib Bukele‘s El Salvador, which he claimed was “not a very democratic administration” and “really has a lot of problems,” as well as Putin’s “zombie state,” the war in Ukraine, and other issues earlier this year.
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