Twitter’s Free Speech Absolutist: Just What Does Elon Musk Believe?

Why would a CEO ignore the potential damage his company's product could do?

When it comes to the news media’s lead stories these days, piling on the Wunderkinder of Silicon Valley, social media, and the crypto verse is the name of the game.  Small wonder: their fall from grace has taken down not only black-tee-shirted stars but also their companies’ market values with astonishing speed.  From the FTX scam, layoffs at Alphabet and Amazon, and Facebook’s meta failure to Twitter’s turmoil, it’s a feeding frenzy with second, third, and even more helpings to go around. 

For many of the marquee names who were lauded by the media only months ago, their problem is obvious: they thought trees really did grow to the sky.  Like back in the day when old-fashioned car makers mistakenly ramped up their assembly lines or retailers opened too many stores just as the economy went south, the new age entrepreneurs misread the post-pandemic market.  Bad decisions followed.  As Ecclesiastes might have said if he showed up as a commentator on CNBC, there’s nothing new under the sun.

For some of the tech world’s glitterati, however, hubris—as the ancient Greeks described excessive pride and self-regard—explains more than lousy choices.  Take Mark Zuckerberg who proclaimed the time had come to invest in a new form of human existence.  He still swears Facebook’s three billion users will jettison reality to live, work, and play in the meta-verse.  Facebook’s market value hit a trillion dollars last year.  In his high dive from Meta Platforms, the renamed company, his prophecy in 2022 helped erase $700 billion during his visionary plunge.

Unlike Zuckerberg’s pursuit of a brave new virtual world, the planet’s richest man has avowed he will achieve a noble goal in the old one.  Elon Musk, the master of Tesla and SpaceX, has asserted his $44 billion takeover of Twitter seeks to advance democracy as well as promote profound dialogue on what ails the human race.  "Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” the news release announcing the final deal intoned last month. 

Musk gave his guidance to Twitter’s cadre in oracular terms.  I am, he said, a “free speech absolutist.”  Running a car and rocket business apparently hasn’t left Musk time to research his free speech concept.  Pity Twitter’s employees trying to figure it out.   Despite social media’s decades-long failures in trying to cull out hate, bile, and falsehood filled content, Musk seems to believe his pronunciamento is crystal clear.  Even a CliffsNotes cram course would show that, from ancient Athens to today’s First Amendment debates, the idea is anything but.

Indeed, Musk’s own words suggest he might be confused himself.  Take the implications of what he’s said about China where he regularly lauds Xi Jinping’s regime.  Musk apparently believes that China’s constitutional guarantee of free speech actually means people can speak out just like Americans.  Interviewed in 2019, he marveled at Chinese Communist Party officials’ “deep concern for the people’s happiness.”  Musk went on to praise their sensitivity to what their citizens think and what they say.  “In fact,” he said, “they're maybe even more sensitive to public opinion than what I see in the United States.”

Musk, of course, may not have read much about China or its communist party lately.  After all, he’s a busy guy.  But with Tesla’s big stake, it’s hard to believe his news feed hasn’t acquainted him with the regime’s state of the art thought police.  They combine best-in-class surveillance technology with brutal repression to handle Chinese who voice opinions out of turn.  Or maybe he’s missed the headlines from Xinxiang.  A million or so Uyghurs there aren’t speaking up, or practicing their religion or culture, because they’re in concentration camps for doing just that. 

To be fair, Musk isn’t the first CEO to make silly statements or grovel before Beijing’s communist powers that be.  From Wall Street to the West coast, captains of finance and industry have kowtowed to advance their companies’ greater good in China’s massive market for decades.  And for his part, Musk’s fawning over its communist leaders has paid off big time.  Tesla’s factory in China and its profits—the country accounted for 25 percent of its revenue last quarter—are jewels in his electric vehicle crown. 

But if self-interest explains Musk’s doubletalk and self-abasement in China, it fails to do the same for his behavior as Twitter’s CEO.  Courting political conflict last week, he has announced Twitter’s doors are wide open.  Banned users whose hate speech, bullying, harassment, violent threats, and disinformation had locked them out are flocking.  Musk justified his decision by citing a risible Twitter online poll.  Not surprisingly, he backhanded the likelihood that its results reflected the trolls, bots, and extremists who voted themselves back into the fold.

As for content moderation to deal with their emissions, Musk asserts that smart code writers and their algorithms can handle the effluvia.  Whatever his faith in technical solutions, political leaders and regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have their doubts and for good reason.  For one thing, Musk has decimated the content moderators’ ranks.  Add to that the fact Twitter’s senior executives who oversaw legal, safety and content issues are gone taking their experience and expertise with them.  In other words, great coders or not, Musk has no Plan B. 

But Twitter’s post-takeover chaos and trajectory raise questions about more than Musk’s management.  Musk has studiously avoided answering the most obvious: just what kind of free speech does he have in mind?  His silence ignores Twitter’s history as a catalyst of hate, not to mention as a platform enabling extremists’ capability to communicate and foment violence.

As for free speech, at present Musk’s red lines amount to “lawbreaking or egregious spam.”   Sophomoric at best, the policy says nothing about antisemitic rappers, misogynist ex-kickboxers, white supremacists, or far right conspiracists, to name only a few in the queue. 

In any case, from the burgeoning antisemitism and hate speech on Twitter since his takeover to his own tweeted sharing of disinformation Musk isn’t shying away from provocative decisions or controversial behavior.  Which brings the second, more important question: when welcoming such content on Twitter amounts to ignoring its dangers, what does Musk himself believe? 

Who knows?  Is it Musk simply being Musk?  Or is Twitter’s “free speech absolutism” empowering potentially dangerous users because they reflect its owner’s views?