Hang on. Before we go any further. Do you support free speech? Not speech that you like or aligns with your narrative. Speech you don't like by people you intensly (perhaps) detest.
My support depends on the actual speech in question, not who is speaking. As a simple summation, I am pro-free speech to the extent that it is beneficial to society. The benefits it brings to society, in full context, are fundamentally what make it a praiseworthy thing, after all.
Why am I not saying a simple "yes?" Because the absolutist "free speech" caricature that's been put forward lately has largely emphasized letting bad actors act badly without consequence and is often a facade for little more than a power grab and avoiding accountability, rather than any principled devotion or appreciation for what makes free speech good.
Do you think it was wrong for pre-Musk Twitter to suspend right-leaning/conservative accounts?
Depends why they were actually suspended. Twitter, under Dorsey, was hardly some ideal organization and was susceptible to normal mistakes being made, of course, which is something that applied across the board. Plenty of left-leaning/liberal accounts were banned for uncertain cause, too, either way.
Right leaning accounts might indeed have been more likely to be banned, though. There's a simple reason for that. There was much more bad behavior being engaged in by right-leaning/conservative accounts than by left-leaning/liberal accounts and the right-wing propaganda network thrives on loudly pretending that people that they think are on their side acting badly and actually facing consequences for their bad behavior are actually the victims. Perverse incentives entice perverse actions.
Wrong to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story?
When your premise is just that false, that rather undermines any credibility you have on that.
At last check, the NY Post's Hunter Biden story was not banned (or even blocked). There were very temporary restrictions put on how it could be spread because it looked likely to be violating a use of hacked material policy while further investigation was done, during a time where there was very real cause for concern about hostile actors doing their best to profit from criminal action. I had and have no problem with the actual actions that were taken. I have far more problem with how dishonestly the events there been used by the right-wing to prop up false narratives, like the one you just cited.
There's no way to verify if you're consistent, of course, but clearly Musk Twitter is much freer than before he bought it.
For a certain version of "free" and for certain people's speech, I suppose.
Musk took over a growing company that was doing fine overall and turned it into a company that's just not financially viable anymore with all the crippling debt he added, then made a bunch of terrible structural business changes that dramatically lowered the company's income. It's just not a positive mark for "free" when that "freedom" is one very short step away from the complete destruction of the platform.
Musk took over a company where the restrictions on speech were pretty much only there for the sake of maximizing profits and changed things up so the restrictions on speech and who gets heard are much more politically based. Changing from a neutral standard for content moderation to a distinctly biased standard for content moderation isn't some positive mark for free speech.
Musk has engaged in a number of anti-free speech lawsuits against those who have used data to demonstrate that there have been unpleasant consequences to some of Musk's structural changes and worked to make it so the data can't be examined anymore. Musk has chosen to sue entities like GARM out of existence for merely recommending not to advertise on his platform as they used fairly objective criteria to determine whether to do so. These are all very clearly anti-free speech actions.
Why should we play along with the pretense that Musk is actually working to protect free speech when he just keeps attacking it in really obvious ways?
worthy crap, this is objectively false.
