A Twitter censorship conundrum for Elon Musk, champion of free speech

Musk’s biggest challenge will be how to deal with governments like Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Kabul that censor Twitter while using it to push anti-US propaganda
To truly protect freedom of speech, he may have to block the government-linked accounts of any country that doesn’t respect it

Robert Boxwell

Published: 1:30am, 1 May 2022

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Assuming Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter to shut it down and grind its servers into powder – something worth considering – he’s about to face a set of challenges that might outweigh those hitting him from America’s left, who have turned on one of their climate change allies in lockstep, fearing he will loosen their ideological hold on the platform.

“Sorry to be free-speech absolutist”, Musk said in early March, explaining why, after sending some of his Starlink satellite broadband terminals to Ukraine to ensure Ukrainians would be able to stay connected after the Russian army invaded, he would not block Russian news broadcasts.

He tweeted that he had been told by “some governments (not Ukraine) to block Russian news sources”, and he wouldn’t do it. Once he owns Twitter, he’ll have more serious government problems to deal with. We’ll come back to this.

Americans of a certain age will remember the free speech battles of the 1970s and 1980s, when the American Civil Liberties Union was one of free speech’s fiercest protectors and when conservative police forces around the country protected even the most odious groups demonstrating on America’s streets because they were Americans, which gave them the right to be odious at the top of their lungs.

One of the most moving photographs I’ve ever seen was of a black police officer protecting a Ku Klux Klansman from an anti-Klan mob at a KKK rally in the 1980s. (It still moves me today.) Seeing it made it hard not to want to defend free speech myself. I often did.

After moving to Asia in the mid-1990s and getting to know people in countries where governments were less liberal and citizens more circumspect about what they said in public, I often had the chance to defend it, even if it wasn’t hard to understand the allure of moderation.

As a Malaysian friend put it after I explained how Americans could call their leaders pretty much any bad thing they wanted and not fear the gulag: “Sure, you could say that, but why would you?” That was hard to argue with.

And maybe you wouldn’t, but you would still defend your absolute right to because, when you stop, the slippery slope of censorship takes you quickly to a darker place. The fierce argument under way in the United States about Musk buying Twitter is very American.

The left, who dominate Twitter, not least through stifling conservative voices, are apoplectic that Musk might stifle that stifling. This will sort itself out.

Musk’s real headache will be what to do about tweets coming from every other country in the world, none of which protects free speech as rigorously as the US.

The European Union warned him this week that Twitter would have to obey new laws prohibiting, among other things, disinformation – whatever that is. But since the EU and other Western democracies are friends, this will resolve itself – like the situation in the US.

A real conundrum though, may be what to do about US adversaries on Twitter. This is already being pointed out by Musk’s critics, such as Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who suggested the one man in the world richer than him might prove himself less principled than a free-speech absolutist should be when it comes to China.

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Beijing uses Twitter to push its viewpoints and propaganda, yet blocks Twitter in China and tolerates no opposing viewpoints on Weibo. Words are today’s weapons of choice for most governments, so giving Beijing the one-way megaphone of Twitter is like giving your opponent your guns in a hot war.

Figuring out what to do with Beijing – or Moscow or Tehran or Kabul – all of whom use Twitter without reciprocity to push anti-US propaganda, will be Musk’s big challenge. These governments are all very much non-free-speech absolutists and would stifle all but their ruling classes globally if they could.

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Musk’s best approach, counterintuitive as it may sound given his absolutist claim, may be to “suspend” the government-linked accounts of any country that doesn’t respect freedom of speech.

Here, I’ll borrow from The New York Times 1930s Soviet apologist Walter Duranty – who justified mass Ukrainian deaths caused by Joseph Stalin trying to build the Soviet Union by saying, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”.

If Musk really believes free speech is an essential part of civilisation, he’ll jettison from Twitter the unanswerable mouthpieces of governments that would seek to shut us all up as they fight the battle for civilisation with their propaganda, and he’ll demand reciprocity as the price of re-entry.

Unlike Stalin’s broken eggs, these eggs will be broken in pursuit of a good omelette. If Musk is a real free-speech absolutist, he may need the courage to shut up a few voices now and then to make sure all voices will be heard in the future.

Robert Boxwell is director of the consultancy Opera Advisors