For Elon Musk, Free Speech Is a Catchphrase, Not a Principle
Elon Musk vowed to scale back censorship on Twitter, but all he did was choose different political targets.
A version of this article was originally published in Queer Majority in May 2024. Read it here.
Two years ago, when the prospect of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter was sending fanboys into orgasmic rhapsody while driving haters into paroxysms of hysterical rage, I wrote in favor of giving Musk a chance. To my ear, he had correctly diagnosed the problems with Twitter — algorithms that foster extremism, politically biased enforcement of the terms of service, and a content moderation policy that went too far in suppressing free expression. His devotees and critics alike both rapturously awaited and apocalyptically foretold the same vision: that Musk would turn Twitter into another right-wing parody like Gab, Parler, or Truth Social, an anarchic wild west where anything goes and the inmates run the asylum.
That’s not how things turned out.
For my part, I stand by my defense of rolling the dice. It’s not as though anyone thought Twitter was a sane, healthy, and prosocial place under previous management. However, it’s abundantly clear that we were all wrong. Elon Musk neither improved Twitter (I’m not calling it “X”) nor transformed it into a domain of unfettered free speech absolutism. Under Musk’s heavy-handed stewardship, Twitter has become the worst of both digital worlds, teeming not only with extremism, disinformation, and anti-LGBT bigotry, but with Elon-approved censorship, too.
In 2022, Musk said his goal in purchasing Twitter and taking it private was to reform the platform, not to make money. True, he pointlessly changed the company name to “X”, thereby incinerating as much as $20 billion in brand value, but he has also monetized the platform into a subscription service with Twitter Blue. Piece by piece, functionality is being dismantled for free users, with restrictions on how many direct messages can be sent, how many posts can be seen, and even basic security features. Now Twitter is testing a new policy that would require all new users to pay in order to tweet anything at all. In 2022, Musk said he was going to get rid of the bots and spam. Today, Twitter is beset with plagues of spambots to shame the biblical locusts of Exodus. In 2022, Musk tweeted, “A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10 percent on left and right are equally unhappy”, and then proceeded to unban virtually everyone on the far right while shitposting and trolling the left for two straight years. The man has a campaign promise-to-action batting average that makes Congress look honest.
The reversal on issues of free expression and censorship has been even more glaring. High on his own messianic fumes of “saving civilization” by restoring free speech to Twitter, Elon Musk rode in on his $44 billion white horse, fired half the company, took up residence on a futon in his San Francisco offices, and became Joffrey Lannister. The lofty enlightenment ideals he espoused on the Twitter acquisition press tour gave way to free expression for me but not for thee once his position atop the blue bird’s throne was secure. Musk has throttled links to outside platforms such as Substack and repeatedly banned journalists and business figures critical of him without explanation. My production coordinator at Queer Majority, where this piece was originally published, was unable to DM me an Elon Musk caricature used in the QM title card. After multiple attempts, her account was temporarily disabled and then restricted for three days. That’s Kim Jong Un-level insecurity. I’m just happy Elon doesn’t have anti-aircraft guns… yet. Meanwhile, Twitter has colluded with authoritarian regimes such as Turkey’s President Erdoğan and India’s Prime Minister Modi to censor their critics.
But it gets worse. These anti-speech policies have been bent in the service of more than just Musk’s fragile ego, Twitter’s competitors, or strongmen threatening to cut off access in their countries. Twitter is using its rules and algorithms to actively foment a climate of anti-LGBT hostility.
In April, QM Editor-in-Chief Rio Veradonir tweeted, “MAGA is wokeness for the ‘alt-right.’ It’s cis white straight male identity politics. [...] It’s a whiny, victimhood-obsessed movement.” The post was instantly slapped with a “visibility limited” flag for violating rules against “hateful conduct.” Between this newfound crusade against “hate speech” and his irrational love of the letter X, Elon has more in common with “woke” people than he thinks. But what about Rio’s tweet was hateful? It wasn’t criticizing the far-right that was the problem, but the use of “cis”, which, along with its longer form, “cisgender”, has been declared an anti-straight “slur” by Elon Musk and added to the platform’s verboten terminology. To be clear, these terms simply refer to people who are not trans and are considered offensive only to anti-trans radicals who vehemently oppose any language that affirms the notion that being trans is a legitimate reality. Twitter went from a social media platform that banned people for misgendering people (a censorious policy Musk justly removed) to a platform that bans words deemed to be a little too trans-affirming.
The cultural change Twitter has undergone in just a year and a half has been truly breathtaking to behold. Before, Twitter denizens walked on eggshells for fear of invoking the ire of overzealous and overbearing left-wing culture warriors. Today, the site is brimming with TERFs, tradcons, religious fundamentalists, populist nationalists, post-liberals, paleo-whatevers, and straight-up fascists roving the landscape like gangs of bloodthirsty gimps in Mad Max. This isn’t an improvement. It’s not even a lateral move. Musk has traded a left-wing cesspool for a right-wing cesspool, and these degenerates, bigots, and knaves are collectively more obnoxious than anything I’ve ever seen from radical trans activists.
Given the green light by a leader who openly sides with them, and with official policies that have lifted the unfair penalties from their tribe and foisted them onto the other, the far-right has achieved on Twitter what they could only dream of on Truth Social. Neither constrained by moderators nor sequestered to their own niche enclaves, the hard right now enjoys not only total access to mainstream discourse — which, regardless of politics, everyone should be entitled to — but an algorithmic thumb on the scale in their favor. This isn’t the free marketplace of ideas. It’s Columbia University in reverse.
On an hourly basis, my inbox now fills with messages smearing LGBT people as “groomers” who are “going after” kids, tying LGBT rights to Jewish conspiracies, and using “faggot” as a slur. Not to mention the many, many folks who reach out to let me know they think the water supply is turning people gay or trans. These are selections from just the past few weeks, and this is with the “quality filter” turned on. Goodness knows what mental waste products never even reach my notifications. “Cis” is censored, but “faggot” isn’t. That’s Elon Musk’s Twitter. It’s why I find myself less interested in the platform, and why the QM team has shifted a lot of our internal communications from Twitter DMs to other services. How we got to this sorry state of affairs is another subject, one I’ve written postmortems about elsewhere and won’t rehash here. Suffice it to say that audience capture is one helluva drug — and one that doesn’t mix well with incredible power and limitless wealth.
The economist Thomas Sowell once observed, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” A quintessential nugget of conservative insight. This is what makes the arc of Twitter so astounding. Politicians and political theorists have spent millennia grappling with the tension that defines free societies, between safety and security on the one hand, and freedom and liberty on the other. Plato wrote that excessive freedom invariably leads to chaos and then tyranny. On the flip side, Dwight Eisenhower said, “If all [people] want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed, and a roof over their heads.” Twitter, under the tutelage of Elon Musk, has delivered us no Sowellian trade-off, just pure downside. It’s censorship without security and chaos without freedom.
Thank goodness civilization does not, in fact, rely on Twitter. But the tale of the blue bird’s gradual slide into sideshow irrelevance offers an important lesson. Free speech can’t just be a culture war rallying cry or an “own the libs” catchphrase people utter like a doll with a ripcord on its back. You need real, consistently applied principles to effectively foster and safeguard free expression. Without principles, it doesn’t matter how much you cosplay as a free speech warrior, you just become the mirror image of the septum-pierced scolds you pretend to stand against.
See also: “The Arc of Elon Bends Toward Insanity”
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Lately I've come to see Twitter as a kind of exposure therapy. I go on it to train myself not to be bothered by insane garbage takes.
I'm no Elon Musk fan, but I'm okay with Twitter sliding into broken irrelevance. Twitter in the Woke Era was awful, a mental health killer. Everyone in the media hung out there all the time and set the tone for our culture, so there was a time when Twitter actually was real life.
Twitter is still shitty now, but at least I feel better about ignoring it because it's less important. In the end, I think the idea of Twitter in general was a mistake. Shoving everyone together in the same digital room was never going to work. Our brains aren't built to handle it.