Over the years, Elon Musk has made a lot of money and used it to pay other people to make some pretty cool things for him. He’s also a horrible person whose list of scandals is so long, you’ve probably forgotten things that would have gotten any other CEO fired, and nowhere is that attitude on display clearer than over on Twitter, the social media network he bought while claiming to defend free speech. As Adam Conover points out in his latest video, though, all the evidence points to Musk doing more to kill free speech in this country.
Now, before we get too far, we need to establish exactly what free speech is. As xkcd’s Randall Munroe so eloquently put it:
The right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say. It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit or host you while you share it. The 1st Amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences. If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door.
This is, of course, a problem for conservatives because their policies are deeply unpopular and objectively horrible. When Democrats get what they want, the wealthy pay more in taxes. When Republicans get what they want, people literally die. And that’s even before you get into the wild conspiracy theories and bigotry their elected officials spew nonstop. When social media companies started banning people for blatantly or repeatedly violating their terms of service, conservatives decided they were being censored. It’s bullshit now, and it was always bullshit.
So Elon Musk bought Twitter under the guise of protecting free speech. The fact that the 1st Amendment only applies to the government, and Twitter was a publicly traded company was as irrelevant as whether or not Musk even understood the distinction. He’s not a defender of free speech. He’s a bigot who happens to have money and used it to amplify the voices of the most vile people on the internet.
Musk didn’t stop there, either. He’s also banned critics, journalists, political activists and other users he just doesn’t agree with. He even decided the term “cis” was a slur. Musk also made Twitter engineers change the algorithm to boost his tweets even to people who didn’t want to see them, more or less forcing others to listen to his speech. Oh, and when advertisers decided they didn’t want their ads appearing near tweets using racial slurs, Musk responded by suing an advertising trade group and forcing them to shut down because they couldn’t afford to fight the lawsuit.
Even if you skip the actual definition of free speech as defined in the 1st Amendment and later interpreted in landmark court cases such as Brandenburg v. Ohio, and you go with Elon’s version, he’s still a hypocrite. He’s also gotten even worse since he put a Trump 2024 win on his vision board. To see just how bad he’s gotten, you’ll have to watch the rest of the video below.