Elon Musk and Free Speech… for Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has said he wants to level the playing field for free speech, and his mechanism will be X. Nevertheless, there are a few disturbing signs that he is not practicing what he preaches.

(gettyimages, Credit: Marc Piasecki)

In the interests of full disclosure, I should start by saying that I know Elon Musk, and that at various times he has been quite kind to me personally. I also have immense respect and admiration for his accomplishments as a visionary businessman.  He singlehandedly created the modern electric car industry, and his willingness to start literally from the ground up to create the first new US-built rocket in more than a generation was inspired.  As he said to me when he described how easy it was to beat NASA at their own game, building a new rocket engine wasn’t really ‘rocket science’.  I also agree with many of his concerns about the left and free speech.

Moreover, Elon is a great salesman, even when there is no real product to sell.  His visions of populating Mars within the next decade don’t, in my opinion, even rise to the level of science fiction.  And even if it were possible, the expense and danger would not justify it.  There is no urgent imperative, either scientific, or financial, to put a few hundred or more humans on Mars in the near future.  In any case, I expect that enough of his astronauts would die in the process so that the program would be curtailed shortly after it were to begin, if it really ever does.

But it is not Elon’s space hallucinations, or his oft-voiced enthusiasm over SpaceX’s accomplishments that are worrisome. Rather, we should be concerned about what appear to be efforts to both systemically impose his own political opinions on X using a megaphone that only he could afford to buy, and with what appear to be efforts to suppress other voices on X when they compete with his own. 

These efforts are particularly striking because, as I alluded above, they are inconsistent with the narrative that Elon self-portrays as the ultimate defender of free and equal speech.

For some time, I was one of the 190 million people who followed Elon on Twitter, and for a short time, I was one of the 660 or so people he followed.   Recently I got tired of reading all of his exuberant pro-Trump and pro-MAGA tweets, and also his making fun of various online competitors, so I decided to take a break and stop following him for a while.   What I discovered was that it made no difference.  His tweets kept showing up on my home screen just as frequently as they had before.

There may be an algorithm that tells X to keep pushing these things on my home screen and to also send notification to my Iphone because I once followed Elon, but I think it is equally likely that selected tweets of his get pushed out to most or all twitter followers.

Elon has been posting almost hourly in support of Trump and also disparaging Biden, Harris and current government policies.  In this regard, Elon tweeted the other day that he felt that not expressing his political opinions on X would infringe on his own freedom of speech.  This is disingenuous.  When I became Chair of a University Physics Department 30 years ago, I realized that this immediately limited the kind of emails I could send out on my university account, compared to those I sent out when I was simply a faculty member. In effect, I represented an organization.  One of the reasons I ended up not following up on various invitations to consider taking on on higher-level administrative positions, from Dean up to President of various universities, was that I realized that I would have to give up speaking out on various issues.  Namely, it would be inappropriate to express my personal views since I would now be seen as representing a much larger community whenever I spoke.  I preferred the freedom to speak and write what I thought, unencumbered by the constraints of high-level positions.  

As the owner of what is essentially one of the most widely read public information services, it seems at the very least inappropriate and unprofessional to openly use that soapbox to promote his own personal political and business agendas.  Owning a business, just as taking a high ranking political or academic position, does compromise one’s free speech, but constraining it is part of the social contract one makes in return for the benefits of being in that position.   If he didn’t control X, and merely was its most popular user, things would be different.

But it gets worse.  It now appears that X itself is displaying political favoritism.As Bloomberg Tech reported this past week, X users started to note that posts that use #MAGA display a custom emoji photo of Trump, and clicking on #Trump2024 caused American flags to rain on the screen.  X responded saying that the emoji were part of a paid promotion.   What definitely wasn’t part of a paid promotion, at least one hopes, was the fact that on Sunday the rebranded @KamalaHQ account wasn’t accepting new followers for about 40 minutes.  Perhaps this was a technical glitch, but if so, the timing was particularly unfortunate.

There are other ways that X seems to be suppressing free speech by censoring tweets that conflict or compete with X’s business.  For example, when I publish pieces or podcasts on this Substack page and try to disseminate them on X, that dissemination is suppress.  Why?  Some time ago, Substack started a twitter-like Notes service.  When that happened any links I, or others, put on Twitter to our Substack pages had impressions suppressed by X—namely they do not go out to all our followers. To my knowledge, this practice still continues.  In order to post these pieces now, I and others are forced to go to a site that creates a short alias that masks the explicit substack.com link on our tweets. 

Elon owns X, and as a result he has the right to do whatever he wants on it, from suppressing competitors to promoting his own politics in order to potentially swing a Presidential election.  But it is difficult at the same time to stand up as a savior of a level playing field for free and open speech in this case.