> And the "this is private" company folks are seething now private company doing private things.

No. It is 100% A-OK for Ol' Muskie to ban who he wants for whatever spurious reasons he wants to post-hoc claim. It's his company, he can do that. 100%.

What people are correctly pointing out is that he rode in on his "FREE SPEECH IS GOOD" horse waving a "BOTS ARE BAD" banner, loudly proclaiming that "Only illegal speech will be banned", re-enabled a whole bunch of accounts for bigots based on bot-ridden unreliable polls, swerved hard to the alt-right lane, picked up a transphobic smoothie and blew both his feet off with a +100 Shotgun Of Hypocrisy by starting to ban people who mock, track, or report on him.

No, this argument drops flat faster than Twitter ad revenue dropped.

First they aren’t “seething”, they’re not even that surprised, they’re just pointing out that the loopy billionaire was insincere the entire time.

It’s simply news when a famous person does the exact opposite of what they’ve been loudly pretending to champion for years. Man bites dog.

Not seething. Just pointing out that we were right all along. The “free speech absolutists” never cared at all about free speech. They just want freedom from criticism. No one has argued he isn’t allowed to do these things. He’s free to trash Twitter as much as he wants. Just as we are free to laugh at the idiocy and the Musk defenders twist themselves in circles trying to justify his behavior.

I think it's less that Twitter doesn't have the right to do these thing (frankly I agree that in the specific case of ElonJet that it's reasonable to have a policy around that), and more that a lot of chaos that affected a lot of people had to happen in order for Musk to realize that it's not as simple as "just have free speech, bing bong so easy".

Except Musk has selectively applied and prioritized whatever he deemed harmful to himself prior to anything else on top of having hamsters in his head run overdrive on how he still 'supports free speech'.

It's abundantly clear from his actions and inactions what is important to him, we have millennia of written history on these cases. At this point people are willfully ignoring it.