Elon Musk’s Latest Crusade: Free Speech Edition

The talk of the town to close out this eventful year has been none other than Elon Musk’s coup of Twitter. The billionaire has been busy, to say the least, since taking over the social media platform three days ahead of Halloween. Before the controversy over the eight-dollar plan for blue verification check marks even had time to resolve itself, the app was already seeing millions of tearful “last tweets” as employees were dismissed in such large quantities that it was difficult to see how the platform could continue operating. The show did go on, however, and Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” seems to be on the exact path he had laid out for himself. After gutting the child safety team, removing the app’s COVID-19 misinformation policy, and reinstating former president Donald Trump’s account as the result of a poll (among other things), Musk has made many substantial changes in his apparent crusade for free speech, but whether or not they are for the better — or even legal — is still in contention. 

While his intentions may sound noble, it is significant to note that Musk’s ostensible tolerance of absolute free speech has proven conditional time and time again. Many have spoken out, including congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, about having opened their Twitter accounts to blank feeds and deleted accounts after criticizing the billionaire. Every step Musk has taken since closing the $44 billion deal has established him as a king among subjects instead of the martyr of democracy he had hoped to emulate. Whether he is motivated by a certain political agenda or a true (but misguided) love for democracy, with some pocket change, Musk now has one of the biggest social media platforms and information outlets at his whim.Though he has the chance to use his power wisely, the month of November has shown that Musk has chosen to do otherwise. 

The fact of the matter is that these so-called “undemocratic restrictions of free speech” are very much legal and have been an essential part of internet development since the establishment of the Community Decency Act (CDA) in 1996 that prevents minors from gaining access to sexually explicit materials on the Internet. Sec. 230(c)(2) of the CDA precludes liability for decisions to remove or restrict access to content that providers deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.” All social media platforms set specific policies and “Terms and Conditions” to state that they can remove violent, obscene, or offensive content and ban users who post or promote such content. These legal regulations, currently being labeled as “violations of free speech,” have beneficially banned terrorist groups that post material promoting violence or violent extremism. In fact, as we previously saw with the suspension of former President Donald Trump across many platforms in 2020, these laws can play an important role in protecting democracy as a whole, and  can prevent further misinformation, hate speech, and inflammatory content. Without Section 230, entire platforms, instead of individuals, would be held accountable for speech that is not protected by the First Amendment, and the Internet would have fewer spaces where we could all exercise our free speech. In other words, without these regulations, we would all suffer the consequences of truly being censored.

So how is this legal? How can the world’s richest man just swoop in and threaten our First Amendment rights and democracy as a whole? Does Musk not face any regulations or restrictions? What’s to stop him from buying, say, all other media outlets next? This wouldn’t be the first time Musk stood invulnerable to laws or regulations. In the past, he has not only defied securities rules but other public regulations as well, including public health regulations concerning the pandemic and rules regarding public safety relating to self-driving technologies. Time and time again, Musk has gotten his way with regulators and municipal officials through hector and intimidation, a prime example of this being the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) struggle to keep Musk under control after suing him for tweets that “led to significant market disruption.” Not only did the billionaire continue to publicly slander the government agency, the SEC was also unsuccessful in obtaining its demands and soon realized its material limits when going up against a man whose “net worth is more than 100 times the SEC's annual budget.” He is enormously successful at creating the impression that everything he does is for the greater good of humanity, whether it’s building the market for electric vehicles or finding a way to transfer human society to Mars. Authorities rarely use their maximum enforcement powers against Musk, and when they do, they are battered by both the public and the power Musk’s fortune enables. As Musk has maintained this cycle of taking legal and regulatory forbearance as an inducement and invitation to demand more, with each new pursuit, regulators have bent further backward to satisfy Musk. 

While this time the target of Musk’s latest crusade is free speech, it has previously been public safety and human development. What’s to come next is dangerously unknown. Whether or not an individual — regardless of their best interests — should be allowed to have so much concentrated power over society may be a further argument concerning the nature of capitalism, but as the victims of the billionaire’s shenanigans, we ought to ask ourselves why we let these things continue to happen. If we care at all about the well-being of our fragile democracy, humankind, or the planet, our priority should be to start taking Musk and all of his ambitions seriously and calling upon our lawmakers to stop holding money and influence above the law.