In a piece that purports to “help” Elon figure out how to moderate content, Hinderaker says he is a free speech absolutist. But in the next paragraph, he says… “just kidding”. [Along the way, he congratulates himself for drafting a purely Orwellian “statute” that Minnesota rightly completely… ignored. And the Supremes (via the Florida version) declared flatly unconstitutional on its face. We reviewed it all, here in the Spring of 2022.]

In any event, all of these sidecars of his… purport to take him (and Elon) off the hook — for the real hard work — the hard work of deciding, for example, what is actually entailed in the predicate offense of “conspiring to commit terrorist acts.” [So the DHS and FBI will have to do that, I guess — and hope not to kill people in the process. When just muting a idiot might save lives?! Wow.]

In truth, this is something the federal and state courts have struggled with, since 9/11 in great measure — so for 22 long years, and mostly on a retrospective, not prospective basis. These lines are exceedingly difficult to parse — especially in a fairly free-wheeling society of ordered liberty, like ours.

But John sweeps it all away, so he can take a pot-shot, at what (he imagines) “liberals” think. No shading; no gradation — just his “my way or the highway” views. Charming.

I will note that John expressly supported the whyte supremacist goons who were plotting to kidnap the sitting Governor of Michigan, about 25 months ago. He said that they were entrapped; that they were only expressing “dissent” against the “terror” of COVID-19 abatement measures. So we well-know… he cannot be trusted to draw these difficult lines.

Here is his nonsense “axiom”, in full:

…I don’t think the issue of content moderation on a social media platform is particularly hard to resolve. First of all, on reflection anyone — including more-or-less absolutists like Musk and me — will agree that some content moderation is necessary. Bots should be banned, child pornography should not be permitted, users should not be allowed to conspire to commit terrorist acts….

So — to sum up — John Hinderaker has no idea of how to do this, even in the US — and is way out of his depth for running a service that hosts German-, French- and British- citizens (as just three examples)… where the law is not so free-wheeling. [Consider here, the quite sensible German laws (given its not-so distant history) against praising Nazi ideals, or symbology, for example.]

My advice for Elon? Good luck, Elon — you’ll need it. You were stupid enough to fire 90% of what was working. Now you’ll have a cloudy, dying $44 billion snow globe on your mantle by Xmas, as advertisers depart, en masse.

Hilarious.