Today’s a day that ends in y, so Elon Musk is going viral. This time, it’s after he clashed with a BBC reporter over the prevelance of “hate speech” on Twitter. “Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like,” Musk said in a clip since shared across the internet, including by mega-stars like Joe Rogan.
This is a noble sentiment, and is being lauded by many. There’s just one problem: Musk hasn’t lived up to it himself since taking over Twitter.
To be fair, the controversial business tycoon has done some things that promote free speech on Twitter. He re-instated the accounts of previously banned yet obviously notable figures like Donald Trump and Andrew Tate, for example. And Musk allowed journalists to report on the previous Twitter regime’s free speech abuses by releasing the “Twitter Files.”
But despite his widespread promises to restore free speech, Musk has also infringed on it in many of the same old ways since taking over—so much so that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a principled and nonpartisan free speech organization, recently declared that “Twitter is no free speech haven under Elon Musk.”
For one, Musk has banned users for their controversial speech in the same way the old regime banned the likes of Trump and Tate. Look no further than Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who was banned from Twitter by Musk after tweeting a swastika-shaped Star of David.
While Ye’s tweet was vile and antisemitic, it would absolutely still be considered “free speech” under the kind of First-Amendment standard Musk originally promised to uphold. Yet Musk not only removed the tweet; he banned Ye entirely over it, claiming the tweet was against their policy of “incitement of violence,” an incredulous claim contradicted by former Twitter insiders. While undoubtedly hateful, Ye’s tweet objectively comes nowhere close to reaching the very high First Amendment threshold for “incitement of violence” as a free speech exception.
With these kinds of suspensions, Musk is essentially doing the same thing Old Twitter did, just to different figures for different reasons.
And that’s not the only way Musk is emulating the old regime.
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The Twitter Files’ most important revelations were those surrounding the disturbing collaboration between the U.S. federal government and Twitter: In a clear attack on free speech principles, federal government figures ranging from the Trump White House to the Biden White House to the FBI aggressively lobbied Twitter to remove the posts of specific users they disliked. This shady collusion between Big Government and Big Tech outraged much of the public, and we have Elon Musk to thank for us knowing what our government has been up to.
But he’s also doing some stuff that’s frankly not all that different from what we saw in the Twitter Files.
As The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim report, Twitter under Musk has complied with demands from the Indian government to censor a BBC documentary that’s critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. So, too, Twitter has recently reportedly started blocking access to certain tweets globally—not just in India—in response to demands from the Indian government.
It’s not just one BBC documentary, either. Musk’s Twitter management has been overtly hostile to press freedom at times, even though the freedom of the press is an essential aspect of free speech. In December 2022, Musk banned journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere after falsely accusing them of “doxxing” him. More recently, Twitter blocked accurate reporting on mass shooters and also recently removed thousands of posts discussing a planned protest in DC, the so-called “transgender day of vengeance.” It even locked many journalists out of their accounts, myself included, for simply reporting on the planned protest.
Musk also aggressively throttled and mislabeled links to the independent journalism platform Substack recently, because he was angry at their business decisions. While he has since walked some of those restrictions on Substack back, Twitter is still reportedly algorithmically downplaying content from Substack.
Musk has defended this and other algorithmic restrictions by saying that Twitter will support “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.” But that’s basically no different than what Facebook said to justify throttling, but not outright banning, the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden story—an act of suppression to which Musk strongly objected.
And algorithmically throttling content you dislike to the point of near-zero visibility is very clearly not in line with the principles of free speech, even if the content is technically still viewable on the platform.
To be fair, many of these content moderation decisions are complicated and potentially defensible on some grounds. But not if you commit to an absolute embrace of free speech, as Musk originally did. That’s why for to those of us excited about a social media platform truly committed to free speech, Twitter under Elon Musk has been a tremendous disappointment.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist and co-host of the BASED Politics podcast.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
