He does this stuff all the time, he's always used language in a very Orwellian manner. It's much easier to promote "freedom" (which means all sorts of things to different people, all of them positive) than it is to promote copyleft and all that it entails. Everybody loves freedom right? But it is obfuscating, hence the neverending confusion about exactly what he means when he uses terms like "free", "freedom", and "free software".
In general, he seems to be almost obsessively sensitive to how the words used to frame ideas can influence someone's feelings towards those ideas ("GNU/Linux"...). Which of course is true, words are very important. However, he channels this obsession with words towards obfuscation rather than clarity. He's very fond of always using derogatory puns for things he doesn't like in his essays, or incorrect acronym expansion. For example, always referring to DRM as "Digital Restrictions Management"- apropos and humorous as it may be, for me it's hard to not feel like he's treating his audience like children and thinks they can be influenced by wordplay. He has expended an utterly tremendous amount of energy over the past 3 decades scolding people for using incorrect terminology, when in fact the confusion over terminology almost entirely comes from him trying to redefine common terms, or him trying to change the term people commonly use to refer to something to another term that carries some sort of loaded meaning.
It's a rhetorical technique, but it's a particular type of rhetorical technique that has always raised massive red flags for me, regardless of who is using it or for what purpose.