Elon Musk the 'Free-Speech' Warrior
Matt Bernardini examines Musk's recent record of protecting purveyors of hate-speech while censoring those who attempt to counter it.
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter…or should I say, er, “X” last year, he portrayed his acquisition as a victory for those who believe in absolute free speech.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said when he announced the deal.
Yet after X’s latest lawsuit, Musk has made clear that he’s just as willing as anyone to restrict some types of posts. Only now many of the posts being restricted are ones that attempt to counter hate-speech.
On Monday X Corp sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a British non-profit organization that has conducted research on the platform’s content since Musk purchased it. Now that kind of research would appear to be well within the organization’s free speech rights, but X Corp has said that it has lost tens of millions of dollars from advertisers.
As CCDH Founder and CEO Imran Ahmed has noted, this kind of attack from Musk has become commonplace, while hate speech continues to spread.
“Elon Musk’s latest legal move is straight out of the authoritarian playbook – he is now showing he will stop at nothing to silence anyone who criticizes him for his own decisions and actions,” Ahmed said in a statement.
It’s become plainly clear that Musk is anything but a free speech absolutist. According to new data from the Berkman Centre for Internet Society at Harvard Law School, Musk has fully complied with a whopping 83 percent of censorship requests.
For the year before Musk took over the company, Twitter had complied with just 50 percent of censorship requests.
It’s notable not just that Musk is complying with the requests, but also who is making them. The data show that half of all censorship requests came from Turkey, a country not exactly known for being a bastion of freedom of speech. Turkey is 165th in the world when it comes to freedom of the press.
Musk defended his decision to comply with the Turkish government’s requests, saying that if he did not do so, the platform would be banned entirely in the country.
However, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales pushed back on this excuse, noting that his company faced a similar problem. Turkey had banned Wikipedia, but Wales fought the ban in the country’s highest court and got it lifted.
“If Elon is now saying ‘We don't care about freedom of expression if it interferes with making money’ then he should just say that,” Wales tweeted.
Aside from cooperating with authoritarian governments, Musk has also screwed over his friends. After hand-picking journalist Matt Taibbi to do entire threads on censorship and Twitter, popularly known as “The Twitter Files,” Musk then throttled Taibbi’s main source of income. In April, Twitter began restricting how users could promote their Substacks, after the platform a Twitter-like product called “Notes.”
Musk has also deemed the words “cis” and “cisgender” to be slurs, and said that the repeated use of them could result in a suspension. Cisgender refers to people who are not transgender or gender-fluid.
This change was made while hate speech has flourished on the platform. According to a new study by researchers at USC, UCLA, UC Merced and Oregon State University, the overall volume of hate speech on the platform has doubled since Musk’s purchase.
“What was surprising was ... that this stuff had increased so dramatically,” Daniel Fessler, who is director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We had not expected that hate users would actually be using more hate words after Elon Musk joined Twitter.”
For Musk, free speech absolutism seems to end when you criticize him or someone who has similar interests as he does. As many on the left have argued in the past, Twitter, or X Corp, is a private platform free to pick and choose what is allowable on its website. Despite his boasting of free speech absolutism, Musk has continued that dynamic. Just now it’s hate speech that is allowable on the website. And everyday the value seems to drop further.