Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

Classic situation where "Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes".

In practice, there is a tension. Absolute free speech is not necessarily safe - the Weimar Republic was a time of unprecedented freedom of expression and it ended badly. The freedom paradox is real: too much freedom can result in the death of freedom, by tolerating anti-freedom movements enough for them to snowball.

Also, you shouldn't assume that these "practical limits" on free speech are new, particularly for the US. In the second postwar period, airing leftist views often resulted in people being put under invasive surveillance - or worse.

There is always a tension in practice, and it's about finding an acceptable set of compromises. Germany is free but you can't print Hitler's works there, and that's just fine.

Twitter should be nationalized. No man should control such a large medium

It’s not just the government. Companies like Twitter are so ubiquitous that they are a form of government entity now, especially when they enforce government talking points. When Twitter decides that talking about the lab leak theory gets you kicked off the platform, they are becoming nothing more than a government tool. This was the breaking point for Musk and for me as well.

Not giving a “platform” to alternative views, no matter how “damaging” you or the government feels it is is crucial for a democracy.

Elon Musk is into politics, isn't that looking strange somehow? I mean he wants to go to Mars, his project was "Flyin' mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun", and now he goes right in the opposite direction. Did he have any major setbacks with his Starship?

I think this topic is a little messier than how you put it.

4chan's /b/ is the same exact place that:

- posted racist, misogynist, misandrist, and shocking porn

- stood up to scientology

- acted as an obfuscator for anonymous

- led raids on other communities

A normal person can pick the things out of that list they don't want and say "be gone". The problem is, the other things on that list don't exist without it. This is generally the allegory and type of connection that keeps our idea of "government free speech" tied somewhat closely with (what I call) "personal free speech".

On the other hand, I moderate smaller communities than /b/ (and other large forums) and I agree, in these smaller settings there are left and right political grifters, there's content that will cause people to leave or backlash, and endless personal disputes that must be mediated.

The problems between my small communities (a couple thousand) and large forums (hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions) are very different, and they serve a very different purpose in the larger ecosystem of communication that I think is difficult to quantify.