Elon Musk Doesn’t Care About Free Speech

In no way has Musk shown a genuine commitment to free speech, even as he continues to pay lip service to the concept. And his decision over the weekend to censor tweets in Turkey may have been his most egregious violation yet. Pressed by Substacker Matt Yglesias on Saturday, Musk responded in a typically petulant—and revealing—fashion. “Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias?” he tweeted. “The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?”

It’s obvious which one Musk wants, but the choice here is far from obvious. Musk could have dared Erdoğan to block Twitter entirely in Turkey. If Erdoğan had blinked, then Musk would have looked noble for once. If Erdoğan instead blocked Twitter, at least his supporters and opponents would have been silenced equally—and such a move would have made his authoritarianism even clearer to voters.

Musk also argued that, well, everyone complies with these requests—and that he was, in fact, being more transparent than his peers. “This is par for the course for all Internet companies—we are just going to be clear that it’s happening, unlike the others,” he tweeted. Except that’s really not the case. In 2014, Erdoğan’s government blocked access to Twitter after it refused requests to censor accounts in the lead-up to local elections. Twitter responded by telling users how to circumvent the ban; access was ultimately restored two weeks later, after an uproar.