Elon Musk’s hypocrisy about free speech hits a new low
Margaret
Sullivan
It’s ‘free speech for me, but not for thee’ in his
world – he doesn’t like it, he sues
Thu 7 Sep
2023 11.07 BST
Even before
he took over Twitter, Elon Musk touted himself as a “free speech absolutist”.
This was
always a troubling notion for an insanely rich guy with a cult following whose
sense of history is as limited as his ego is boundless.
As it turns
out, what Musk had in mind was something more along the lines of “free speech
for me, but not for thee”, as the title of the revered columnist Nat Hentoff’s
1992 book put it.
A few days
ago, he threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League – for defamation, no less
– blaming the non-profit for driving billions of dollars in advertising from
his company. The ADL has criticized Twitter for failing to take action against
hate speech, charging that fewer than a third of posts flagged for antisemitic
content were removed or sanctioned; and it joined other civil rights groups
last year in calling for advertiser boycotts.
But
clearly, if anything has destroyed the value of the company for which he paid
an ill-considered $44bn, it’s been Musk himself.
He’s made a
series of stunningly bad decisions that seemed designed to drive away users and
advertisers. Rebranding Twitter, nonsensically, as X was one; another was
removing unpaid verification symbols, making it much more difficult to figure
out who is real and who is an impostor.
Yet another
was the restoration of thousands of banned accounts.
“Musk has
declared open season for hate on his platforms,” Suzanne Nossel, author of Dare
to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, and the CEO of PEN America, the
free-expression organization, told me.
Twitter was
far from great under its co-founder Jack Dorsey, but at least an army of
content moderators tried to restrain the worst offenders.
Under
Musk’s control, many of those employees have been fired or have departed in
disgust.
But a few
days ago, things got much worse. Over the weekend, Musk engaged with posts from
far-right figures by “liking” or responding to them. When the ADL called him
out, he threatened to sue and got his ardent followers to go on the attack.
The hashtag
#BantheADL went viral, fanning the flames of antisemitism, already ablaze in
the US and around the world.
“It is
profoundly disturbing that Elon Musk spent the weekend engaging with a highly
toxic, antisemitic campaign on his platform,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the
non-profit’s chief executive, noting the effort has been promoted by
“individuals such as white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Christian nationalist
Andrew Torba, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and others”.
Then things
got worse.
“We saw the
campaign manifest in the real world,” Greenblatt said, referring to masked men
marching outside Orlando, Florida, waving flags adorned with swastikas and
chanting: “Ban the ADL.”
Musk claims
he opposes antisemitism in all forms, but it sure doesn’t look that way.
“Those who
go up against the ADL tend to find themselves on the wrong side of history,”
Nossel said, noting the organization’s fights for more than a century against
the Ku Klux Klan, fascists and white supremacists.
Free-speech
issues aren’t easy to parse these days. The digital world, with its
lightning-fast speed and worldwide reach, has changed everything. There are
legitimate disagreements about what’s allowable on social media platforms.
But Musk’s
approach never made sense. “By ‘free speech’, I mean that which matches the
law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” he declared before
he bought Twitter. “If people want free speech, they will ask government to
pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the
will of the people.”
Musk’s
rhetoric seemed to conflate the first amendment with practices imposed by a
corporation.
“It’s not
just about turning up the free-speech dial, because there are always
trade-offs,” Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment
Institute at Columbia University, told me then.
If there
were no limits on harassment and abusive speech, people – particularly women
and members of historically oppressed groups, who often are the targets – would
leave the platform altogether.
And that,
Jaffer said, is not a free-speech victory: “Nobody wants a platform on which
anything goes.”
Musk seems
immune to that kind of reasoned discussion. He wants revenge.
Just weeks
ago, X Corp filed a $10m suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate,
claiming revenue loss due to “false and misleading claims”; the center had
published research finding that hate speech on the platform had soared.
The suit
Musk has threatened against the ADL would likely be for much more, since he
claims its criticism has cost his company billions.
Like many a
mogul, Musk doesn’t like to be challenged.
And his
company’s precipitous decline has him searching for a scapegoat when he ought
to look in the mirror.
In
targeting the ADL, he’s proven himself not a free-speech absolutist but an
absolute bully.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politi
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