Even before he took over Twitter, Elon Musk touted himself as a “free speech absolutist”.
This was always a troubling notion for an insanely rich guy with a cult following whose sense of history is as limited as his ego is boundless.
As it turns out, what Musk had in mind was something more along the lines of “free speech for me, but not for thee”, as the title of the revered columnist Nat Hentoff’s 1992 book put it.
A few days ago, he threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League – for defamation, no less – blaming the non-profit for driving billions of dollars in advertising from his company. The ADL has criticized Twitter for failing to take action against hate speech, charging that fewer than a third of posts flagged for antisemitic content were removed or sanctioned; and it joined other civil rights groups last year in calling for advertiser boycotts.
But clearly, if anything has destroyed the value of the company for which he paid an ill-considered $44bn, it’s been Musk himself.
He’s made a series of stunningly bad decisions that seemed designed to drive away users and advertisers. Rebranding Twitter, nonsensically, as X was one; another was removing unpaid verification symbols, making it much more difficult to figure out who is real and who is an impostor.
Yet another was the restoration of thousands of banned accounts.
“Musk has declared open season for hate on his platforms,” Suzanne Nossel, author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, and the CEO of PEN America, the free-expression organization, told me.
Twitter was far from great under its co-founder Jack Dorsey, but at least an army of content moderators tried to restrain the worst offenders.
Under Musk’s control, many of those employees have been fired or have departed in disgust.
But a few days ago, things got much worse. Over the weekend, Musk engaged with posts from far-right figures by “liking” or responding to them. When the ADL called him out, he threatened to sue and got his ardent followers to go on the attack.
The hashtag #BantheADL went viral, fanning the flames of antisemitism, already ablaze in the US and around the world.
“It is profoundly disturbing that Elon Musk spent the weekend engaging with a highly toxic, antisemitic campaign on his platform,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the non-profit’s chief executive, noting the effort has been promoted by “individuals such as white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Christian nationalist Andrew Torba, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and others”.
Then things got worse.
“We saw the campaign manifest in the real world,” Greenblatt said, referring to masked men marching outside Orlando, Florida, waving flags adorned with swastikas and chanting: “Ban the ADL.”
Musk claims he opposes antisemitism in all forms, but it sure doesn’t look that way.
“Those who go up against the ADL tend to find themselves on the wrong side of history,” Nossel said, noting the organization’s fights for more than a century against the Ku Klux Klan, fascists and white supremacists.
Free-speech issues aren’t easy to parse these days. The digital world, with its lightning-fast speed and worldwide reach, has changed everything. There are legitimate disagreements about what’s allowable on social media platforms.
But Musk’s approach never made sense. “By ‘free speech’, I mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” he declared before he bought Twitter. “If people want free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”
Musk’s rhetoric seemed to conflate the first amendment with practices imposed by a corporation.
“It’s not just about turning up the free-speech dial, because there are always trade-offs,” Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told me then.
If there were no limits on harassment and abusive speech, people – particularly women and members of historically oppressed groups, who often are the targets – would leave the platform altogether.
And that, Jaffer said, is not a free-speech victory: “Nobody wants a platform on which anything goes.”
Musk seems immune to that kind of reasoned discussion. He wants revenge.
Just weeks ago, X Corp filed a $10m suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, claiming revenue loss due to “false and misleading claims”; the center had published research finding that hate speech on the platform had soared.
The suit Musk has threatened against the ADL would likely be for much more, since he claims its criticism has cost his company billions.
Like many a mogul, Musk doesn’t like to be challenged.
And his company’s precipitous decline has him searching for a scapegoat when he ought to look in the mirror.
In targeting the ADL, he’s proven himself not a free-speech absolutist but an absolute bully.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
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