I believe that free speech is crucial to human thriving, but just by its nature of being a centrally controlled platform which pushes forward the ideas it wants and takes money from advertisers, Twitter has never been free speech. And if you're going to have rules on what speech is allowed and algorithms that push certain speech forward, it's very telling what speech is allowed and what speech gets pushed forward.
Then why does a free-speech absolutionist constantly bow down to dictatorships to censor users [0]? And why did he repeatedly ban outspoken critics of his person?
If you truly believe that he believes in free speech being crucial to human thriving, those actions make no sense.
However, if they this stance is just a veneer for other motivations, serving to blind the gullible and win points with conservatives (a lot of overlap between the two groups nowadays in the US, as seen by the reception of recent news about the prominent court case), they do. You can decide for yourself what to believe. I think the facts speak for themselves.
