Telegram and X: Free Speech Absolutists or Criminality Enablers?

The Telegram founder's arrest and the new list of Elon Musk's financial backers, tell us a lot about the so-called 'free speech absolutists', says Matt Bernardini.

With the court-ordered release of the full list of X shareholders, along with the arrest of Telegram’s founder, Elon Musk and his ilk have come out to proclaim themselves as the saviors of free speech, this time in defense of a man who ran a messaging app that allowed criminals and drug dealers to flourish.

First, the recent revelations about who actually owns X, and it’s not pretty. Included in the list of revealed shareholders are such free speech crusaders we Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud; 8VC, a venture capital firm that was co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, who also was involved in starting the intelligence firm Palantir, and an LLC run by three people who also run the Qatar Investment Authority. 

There’s also Sean Combs, who recently had his house raided as part of a sex trafficking investigation. 

There are other, harder to trace entities like Shahidi Tactic Group LLC, which is a Delaware corporation with no public profile. Several other obscure LLCs are listed.

For someone who purports to be the global protector of people’s right to speak, Musk seems to be propped up by those whose views appear to be antithetical to that goal. According to Amnesty International, human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia are routinely detained and the death penalty is often handed down.  

The Saudi government has even extended its crackdown to those who send out tweets on X, the same platform owned by Musk. In May, Asaad al-Ghamdi, 47, a Saudi teacher, was convicted of posts he made online. His brother had previously been sentenced to death for posts that he made on X. One lawsuit directly accuses X of complicity, alleging that the social media network had disclosed user data “significantly more often” than the US or UK.