Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

As you’ll recall, Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist” but his definition of free speech… is not free speech supportive at all. It’s the opposite.

Saying that free speech means “that which matches the law” means that when you have an oppressive, censorial government, they can suppress speech all you want, and Musk will support it. We’ve pointed this out many times, especially with regards to India.

As you’ll recall, the Modi regime has been especially authoritarian and suppressive of critics. The Modi government demanded Twitter silence certain critical accounts and even threatened to jail employees if the company didn’t obey. Twitter fought back, leading to its offices being raided by law enforcement. Finally, last year, Twitter filed a lawsuit to try to stop the Indian government from censoring content on the platform.

This was during the period of time where Elon had signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter, but was having extremely cold feet about it. A true “free speech absolutist” might have cheered on this legal action by Twitter, fighting for free speech. Instead, in court documents, he complained about Twitter taking this action, worrying that it would hurt revenue in India.

So, it should be little surprise that now that Musk is in control, when Modi came calling, asking him to ban various journalists and critics, the new “free speech supporting” Twitter gladly blocked the accounts in question, as seen in this report from the always excellent Rest of World site.

The blocked Twitter accounts include those belonging to journalists Pieter Friedrich, Sandeep Singh, Kamaldeep Singh Brar, and Gagandeep Singh; Canadian politician Jagmeet Singh and poet Rupi Kaur; and pro-Khalistan member of parliament Simranjit Singh Mann. A number of these accounts, which include prominent Sikh voices in the diaspora, were putting out credible information amid the current turmoil in Punjab. 

How very free speechy.

And, yes, people are noticing that Musk is full of shit and old Twitter supported free speech:

“[Twitter CEO Elon] Musk has been quite categorical [in talking about] ‘free speech’ but laws of the land apply, [and] there is a clear contradiction in the statement,” Prateek Waghre, policy director at digital rights advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation, told Rest of World. 

Twitter is the only social media platform to have ever pushed back against similar demands in the past, Waghre noted. “Earlier, it does seem that Twitter did at least push back against some requests [for accounts to be taken down],” he said, adding that there’s no clarity on how many such requests Twitter complied with versus the number it rejected.

Rest of World reports that one of the blocked journalists told them that they received no notification or warning from Twitter that this was happening:

One of the journalists whose account remains inaccessible in India told Rest of World they never received a notification from Twitter informing them of the impending block. “If I tweeted anything that was fake or rumor or hate speech, then the proper case should be registered against me,” they said, requesting anonymity as they didn’t want to publicly comment on an ongoing issue. “Otherwise, the account should be restored with an apology from the government.”

Contrast this to how the old regime handled nearly identical issues:

In June 2022, Mohammed Zubair, the founder of Indian fact-checking site Alt News, received an email from Twitter after one of his tweets was flagged by the Delhi Police for violating the Information Technology Act, 2000. However, not only was this tweet not taken down, Twitter’s email read that it “strongly believes in defending and respecting the voice of our users.”

While it seems pretty clear that when Elon Musk talks about being a “free speech absolutist” he really means only for his own speech, and those of his close friends or those who agree with him, this just seems like yet another data point.

Still, I eagerly await the “Twitter Files” from Matt Taibbi revealing the internal debate on how to deal with these demands from the Indian government. I’m sure they’ll be coming any day now. Any day.