• Buterin says Musk’s recent Twitter bans lead to “the path to authoritarianism.”
• Musk prohibits “any tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location”
• Buterin suggests one month’s advance notice before implementing new policies.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin raises significant concerns in the wake of Elon Musk’s recent wave of Twitter censorship. He claims that the site’s latest deluge of account suspensions leads it down “the path to authoritarianism.”

In response to a post praising Musk, Buterin claimed that Musk was using a tactic he refers to as “central planning as overfitting.”

The problem is the way in which the policies were introduced, seeming to retrofit around Elon’s views on very specific situations.

Basically “central planning as overfitting”:https://t.co/jS4GGMPINf

Good policy should be decided behind veil of ignorance first, applied second

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 16, 2022

After Musk’s banning of two accounts, @ElonJets and @CelebJets, a surge of censorship concerns ensued. These accounts track Musk’s plane and the private jets of several celebrities.

Such bot trackers retrieve publicly accessible data and rebroadcast it, which is permitted in the United States.

Perceiving it as a threat to his safety and privacy, Musk went a step further and banned Jack Sweeney’s personal account, the architect of Elon Jets Twitter bot.

Shortly after, Musk promptly enacted a new Twitter policy that prohibits “any tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location,” except for “a crisis scenario to aid with humanitarian operations or in relation to public engagement events.”

Despite Musk’s earlier declaration to allow Sweeney’s tracking account in the spirit of “free speech,” the banning of these accounts serves as a backpedaling maneuver to restrict live location sharing.

Buterin also recommended that Twitter should give users one month’s advance notice before implementing any new content moderation guidelines.

Banning things should be done slowly and with lots of speed bumps despite the greater harm that results from that kind of approach,” Buterin said.

Buterin does not necessarily favor tracking celebrity jets. However, he adamantly opposes sudden Twitter bans.

Actually I have a lot of sympathy for much stricter social norms around leaving people including celebrities alone in peace. In my ideal world, Elon’s jet would very much *not* be publicly trackable.

The concern is that the style of decision making in these bans…

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 16, 2022

Buterin has previously criticized prominent figures globally for acting in an authoritarian manner. Buterin publicly denounced Putin’s “zombie regime” and the war in Ukraine earlier this year.

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