Can We Finally Stop Pretending Elon Musk Is A “Free Speech Absolutist”? He’s Not

A challenge for the mainstream media: can you stop saying that Elon Musk is a free speech absolutist?

Over the past few years, we’ve had a number of posts highlighting just how laughable it is that Elon Musk claims that he’s a “free speech absolutist.” He never has been. Remember that even before he took over Twitter, he had a long history of suppressing and attacking speech that challenged him. He had fired employees who spoke up in ways he didn’t like. He banned someone from buying a Tesla for complaining about a Tesla launch event. He’s fired union organizers. He threatened to sue a Tesla critic and intimidated the guy enough that he stopped writing about Tesla.

And, of course, since taking over the platform, he has shown time and time again that he’s no friend of free speech. Remember, he’s filed at least three lawsuits against critics in some form over their speech. He sued CCDH for a report about hate speech on ExTwitter. He sued Media Matters for an article showing ads next to horrible content. And, most recently, he sued GARM for having the temerity to suggest advertisers check to make sure websites will keep their brands safe before advertising.

All of those are the opposite of free speech absolutism. They are entirely about abusing his own wealth and power to use the power of the state to crush entities for their own free speech.

And yet, Bloomberg is coming along with this ridiculous headline:

Musk’s Free Speech Mantra Collides With Crackdowns on Hate Speech and Disinformation

And it’s not just the headline writers (often different than the article authors). The piece by reporters Kurt Wagner and Michael Shepard starts out with the same framing:

Elon Musk’s absolutist version of free speech has thrown the world’s richest man and his X social-media platform into the crosshairs of governments worldwide.

In the UK, officials are weighing tougher rules for sites like X after a surge of online disinformation fueled an outbreak of riots. In India, X was ordered this year to remove posts and block certain accounts in response to farmer protests. And in Brazil, Musk is in a running battle with the nation’s highest court over its orders to suspend users who had circulated fake news.

This is not just lazy. It’s wrong. It’s not just accepting Musk’s own false framing as fact, it’s literally misleading readers. Musk often takes to saying that you shouldn’t listen to the mainstream media, and this is one case where he’s right.

Musk’s position has never actually been an “absolutist” version of free speech. He himself has admitted that what he means by free speech is “that which matches the law.”

Of course, this is nonsensical. The most important concept of “free speech” is that it is to protect against government suppression of speech. Under Musk’s definition, there is no such thing as free speech, because the government is still allowed to pass any laws it wants to suppress speech.

Taking it even further, the idea that it is Musk’s “absolutist version of free speech” that is getting him yelled at by other countries is silly. Musk has willingly bent over to remove speech at the behest of authoritarian leaders he likes, each time falling back on his “that which matches the law” rhetoric to justify it.

He’s only clashed with government requests for takedowns when he personally disagrees with those governments. So, yes, he’s fighting with the UK and Brazil (and before that Australia), but it’s weird to include India in there, as Musk was perfectly happy to pull down content on Modi’s behalf. He was also willing to block content on behalf of Erdogan in Turkey.

As McSweeney’s rightfully parodied, Musk’s position on free speech is a variation on: “I will defend free speech to the death. Or until an autocrat asks me to stop.” Except with one addendum: “but if the leadership of the country is just slightly to the left of my own politics, I will once again stand for free speech.”

Musk’s conception of free speech has never been absolutist by any stretch of the imagination. It has been entirely “we should allow the speech I like, and not allow the speech I dislike.” This, of course, is many people’s incorrect understanding of free speech.

Yes, some people like to pretend that his version of free speech is about allowing more people to say more things on ExTwitter, but even that is false. Musk has been banning people for much more arbitrary and capricious reasons than Twitter ever did before. While he has his own free speech rights to moderate however he wants as the owner of the platform, his own moderation spasms are way more chaotic and stupid than anything that the previous regime did.

Yes, every website learns that it needs to do some level of moderation. That’s the whole content moderation learning curve. Without that, your site is filled with spam and garbage. There can be vast differences in how one travels that learning curve, and some approaches can be more speech supportive than others. But nothing that Elon has done suggests he’s any more supportive of free speech than any other site.

So why is Bloomberg claiming that Musk is taking an absolutist free speech stance?

That’s accepting his false framing of the situation. The reality is that Musk has no principled support for free speech beyond “I want to unban some assholes who got banned by Twitter for violating policies I disagreed with, namely mocking trans people.” Now that he’s in control of Twitter he’s implementing the same kinds of moderation policies, just more chaotic and less principled.

And his constant legal attacks on those who speak out against him should make it clear that he’s very much a censorial litigator, rather than a free speech absolutist.

His claims of being a free speech absolutist and the rare fights he takes on with governments (whose politics all seem to differ from his own) have nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with him. He wants to play to his base who has been deluded by articles like this Bloomberg piece to believe that Musk actually cares about free speech, or he wants another chance to make himself out to be a “free speech martyr.”

Free speech means something. Free speech absolutism means something. Elon understands neither, and the media is doing its readership a total disservice by accepting Elon’s framing.

A true free speech absolutist vision for social media would include things like building on an open protocol, which removes the ability of governments to pressure individual companies to do their censorial bidding. It would also mean regularly standing up to all governments that seek to suppress speech via coercion and threats. Elon hasn’t done any of that.