Quite so, it renders the whole thing meaningless. Musk said he was banning West for 'inciting violence' which surprised me and affirmed my feeling that he's either a shallow thinker who doesn't really know what he's doing or is just play-acting.

West tweeted an image of a swastika in a star of David - technically an obsolete symbol of the Raelian UFO cult, in practice it suggested Nazis vs Jews to any casual observer. In the context of West's long-simmering beef with Jewish people and current manic episode of shouting about his enthusiasm for Hitler from inside a ski mask, it was certainly meant to taunt and would fit most people's standard for hate speech.

But incitement to violence? Not exactly, and that's why I say Musk doesn't seem to know what he's doing. There is an indirect kind of incitement, in that it inciting people to behave like Nazis is synonymous with violence; neo-Nazis might deny the holocaust but are just as likely to follow up with the suggestion that it would be a good idea, and in conversation among themselves are a lot blunter about their desire to do violence, preferably on a grand scale. This is why Nazis complaining about free speech is a bad joke, since their gameplan for pretty much any speech they dislike is to simply kill the speakers.

But legally speaking, incitement to violence has a much narrower threshold; it has to be be specific and produce imminent lawless action. For a long time this meant internet speech didn't cunt at all, as jurists figured there couldn't be an imminent risk if the speaker and the recipient were in different places, and that electronic communication was too attenuated to inflame the passions of its receivers. Legislators and courts have somewhat caught up to the realities of the internet age and so things like SWATting or issuing threats by voicemail or online are taken much more seriously than they used to be (to a fault in some jurisdictions like the UK, whose legislators have a Canute-like fondness for prescriptivism).

In this sense, West's tweet absolutely is not incitement to violence, because while it endorses Nazism and Jew-hatred in a trollish way, it lacks the specificity (in action, time, or place) to merit a legal charge. It's not impossible that West might end up suing Twitter or Musk personally for defamation, given his wealth, mania, and apparent ability to hold a grudge.

Free speech advocates have long wrestled with the ramifications of declaring some speech to be 'hate speech' - I think myself that hate crimes are a legislative punt by making a new and scary-sounding law that doesn't mean very much, rather than clarifying existing law and letting juries weigh the significance of hatred as a possible motivation in the trials of violent crimes. Free speech absolutists, in whose company Musk previously placed himself, generally insist on the narrow legal standard of criminality as the only acceptable reason to inflict bans, and argue that all other speech should proceed unchecked. This argument generally arrives clad in the purple robes of Platonic idealism, though in practice totally un-moderated environments soon resemble an orgy of cynics behaving as obnoxiously as possible to maximize their sense of freedom.

So if Musk is just making it up as he goes along, then he's in the situation of alienating everyone to his left and right simultaneously. I don't know how closely he's supervising content moderation decisions, (probably not very) but the reappearance on Twitter of super far right figures like Brett Stephens and Andrew Anglin (currently evading a federal arrest warrant) suggests the 'public square' is going to see regular brawls for a while.