«My commitment to free speech extends to not banning an account that tracks my plane, even if doing so poses a direct risk to personal safety.«. So said Elon Musk, on his twitter account, more than a month ago, on November 7. An emphatic statement… dubious but forceful, with which he wanted to make it clear that for him freedom of expression is an absolute and inalienable right, even though it may be over others such as the right to one’s own safety.

I say his statement is questionable because really the only thing the Twitter account did was collect the type of information that is public and feeds popular services like FlightRadar24 and others. An aircraft in flight continuously transmits a signal with data about it (identifier, speed, altitude, etc.) and this data is collected by an extensive network of antennas (public and private) that allow monitoring. flights in real time.

And to make it even more clear how accessible it is, do you want to know where the data used in Elon Musk’s jet tracking account came from? Well, the ADB-S Exchange website. Flight information is only hidden in certain cases and specific geographies, especially those in which they are not, for God’s sake, friends of free speech. In the rest of the world, as you can see with many services of this type, you can and should know.

However, Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech seems to be a bit like Guadiana, due to what appears and disappears. The difference is that the river is doing it for environmental and ecological reasons, while in the case of the new owner of Twitter, it seems to be more responsive at any moment to what seems to be right or wrong. And I don’t know, tell me if I’m wrong, but a “commitment” that comes and goes based on convenience and/or personal mood isn’t a commitment, it’s more of a marketing campaign.

Just a few days ago, the creator of a Twitter account that tracked the movement of Elon Musk’s jet claimed to have been privately informed that his account was suffering shadow banIn other words, everything seemed to be working fine for him, but in reality his messages were hidden from other users of the social network. And that might seem like an exaggeration, but given what happened today, it suddenly starts to seem a lot more likely.

Musk and Twitter’s justification for this measure certainly is its zero tolerance policy towards robots, No? It sounds great as an argument… until we see data like the one SparkToro provides when they audit your account. While I don’t like the shoes at all, it seems those who swell his legion of followers haven’t been as unlucky as the guy who posted the billionaire jet flights:

70.2%, seven out of ten followers. In other words, if the data provided by this online tool is completely accurate, of Elon Musk’s estimated 121.3 million Twitter followers, there would actually be “only” 36.9 million. And yes, I only wrote in quotes because almost 37 million is still a huge amount. But of course, it’s striking that in the fight against bots, the first account to go down was the one that made it uncomfortable, and not the more than 84 million “suspicious” accounts according to the said report that follow it.

Whoever wants to believe that the jet tracking account fell for the fact that it is a bot account, believe it, they would miss more. But for those who think that this seems too much of a coincidence for a mere coincidence (we, because I am included in this group) favor the principle of parsimony, or as it is more commonly known, Ockham’s razor. And of course from his hand an exercise in hypocrisy of those who serve to identify people more clearly.

“Free speech as long as it doesn’t bother me” is not free speech, no matter how much one tries to twist the arguments to justify it. And we seem to be in those on Twitter with a supposed advocate of free speech at the fore. But hey, it’s Twitter, at least we have today’s reactions to a November tweet, who doesn’t console himself because he doesn’t want to. Of course, the next time you consider recasting yourself as a defender of free speech, you’d better remember what happened today… and shut your mouth.