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As a left leaning person myself I have to say 'our side' is feeling the consequence of karma right now.
A free speech absolutist should attempt to preserve the opinions of his dissenters the most, given there's temptation to censor those with contrary views, particularly when the contrary view is given in a snarky tone. Clownlon, if he was fair and truly a free speech advocate, would hire leftist, rightist, and centrist content moderators who attempt to moderate in good faith. It seems clear, he's just someone with a huge ego and his free speech spiel is no different than leftists and their desire to censor anyone who has a contrary opinion, particularly Trump.

The reason for free speech being a primary principle to defend no matter the political label you assign to yourself, is that sooner or later, everyone will probably have some view not supported by the mainstream and even considered offensive and "not correct" e.g. some feminists who were pro-censorship of "red pill" type philosophies, who are now being censored for their anti-trans views. To be principled on this means accepting someone will say mean things to you or offensive things, and it should be okay, so long as you can talk smack back :-)

> A free speech absolutist should attempt to preserve the opinions ...

Sadly framing opinions as opinions has been eroded by those who present them as facts (ie possibly lies) and those who believe lies are also free speech. The old maxim about not shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre perhaps needs to be properly codified.

I think you have to be careful here, given CNN is likely to label opinions/facts from Fox News as lies, and Fox News is likely to label opinions/facts as lies. False claims of certain emergency events, such as claiming there's a fire or gun shooting, are clearly different than interpretation of political events.
Whether Musk is or is not going to implement a fair stance on 'free speech' is still up in the air. He has done several things to level the playing field but also stumbled on the way and will surely stumble more.

Lately (as in over the last few days) a multitude of left leaning accounts have been suspended, most of them due to breaking clear rules on incitement, but others not so clear were lumped in with them. The latest suspension of 'Ye' is also controversial, don't think most people want to see a swastika inside a david's star, but, it doesn't seem he really want to spread any hate, rather the topics is so toxic in society that we all recoil from the slightest mention of the subjects. Do I think 'Ye' is correct? Heck no. But how can we know if we aren't allowed to explore, this is worrisome.

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So some people and journalists don't like it when the terms of service applies to them.

After all, it is a platform platform™ and has its own terms of service like before. It's just that it now equally enforced and applies to everyone more properly.

So you can provide evidence the people in question clearly violated Twitter's TOS?
The article clearly states how some broke the TOS.

Nevertheless Musk claims that accounts shouldn't be banned, just the content of the tweets so there's a fair bit of hypocrisy everywhere.

No it doesn't. In fact the article is about how they didn't directly violate the TOS but were subject to a targeted harassment campaign. You obviously have no evidence to support your claims and this is just a weak attempt at trolling.
Yes it does. It is all in the tweet linked in the article and you know it; as you continue to choose to ignore it [0]. Another quick search shows that they were doing a "call for action" with a burning car for what? More violence? [1]

It appears the Intercept article is doing everything they can to defend content that is inciting or calling for violence and the evidence. So obviously they violated the ToS for inciting violence.

[0] https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1596087310042296320

[1] https://archive.ph/3wvcq