Buterin prefers that Twitter provide users 30 days' advance notice before enforcing new content moderation guidelines.
In response to Elon Musk's recent wave of Twitter censorship, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is sounding the alarm. He claims that the site's recent blitz of account suspensions are leading it down "the path to totalitarianism."
Buterin commented on a post praising Musk and said that Musk was using a tactic he terms "central planning as overfitting," whereby he develops regulations that "seem to refit around Elon's ideas on very particular instances."
Musk's decision to block the accounts @ElonJets, which records Elon's aircraft, and @CelebJets, which tracks the celebrity private planes, sparked the most recent round of censorship complaints. Such bot trackers retrieve publicly accessible data and rebroadcast it, which is permitted in the United States.
But Musk went a step farther and banned Jack Sweeney's personal account, the guy who created the Elon Jets Twitter bot, seeing it as a danger to his personal safety and privacy.
Then, shortly after, Musk promptly put into effect a new Twitter policy that prohibits "any tweets or accounts that reveal someone's live location," with the exception of "a crisis scenario to aid with humanitarian operations or in relation to public engagement events."
Despite Musk's earlier declaration that he would not outlaw Sweeney's tracking account in the spirit of "free expression," the prohibitions represent a backpedalling move to restrict live location sharing.
Buterin disagreed with the argument made by another user that Musk was only "responding to system inputs" by quickly banning these monitoring accounts.
The way to authoritarianism is "acting 'fast and forcefully in response to stimuli' when the action in issue is prohibiting things," said Buterin.
Buterin also blasted Musk for blocking links to Mastodon, a rival social networking platform, calling the action "very awful." Although Mastodon's official Twitter account was also suspended for posting links to its version of the "ElonJet" account, it is unclear why connections to Mastodon are presently prohibited.
Decrypt's request for a comment was not immediately met by a response from Twitter.
Twitter users don't seem to be in favour of banning accounts for publishing already-public user locations. 59% of respondents to a poll Musk organised, with a total of nearly 3.1 million votes, said such accounts should be unbanned "immediately," not in a week as Musk had recommended.
Which type of Twitter does Buterin favour? One that doesn't restrict competitor sites and tries to be objective rather than using personal prejudices and experiences.
Buterin stated, "Good policy should be decided first behind a curtain of ignorance, and then applied second."
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