Sunday, Dec. 18, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Forget all the “free speech” hogwash Elon Musk and the far-right trade in. They don’t even understand the meaning of the term. Free speech has to do with whether the government can restrict it, not restrictions created by private businesses. But that doesn’t matter now because we have learned what kinds of speech Musk values and intends to protect.
Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has already shown that he agrees with violent white supremacists, insurrectionists, political extremists and conspiracy theorists, and wants to promote their words. Last week, he revealed how eager he is to close the door on discourse. Indeed, it seems Musk will do almost anything — including overpaying by billions on a financially risky business venture — to spread disinformation and silence dissent.
Last week, Musk banned the Twitter account of a college student who posted information about the location of Musk’s private jet using the handle @ElonJet. The next day, he suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists who reported on Musk’s decision to censor the jet-tracking account and included information about where the account was getting its publicly available information on Musk’s jet.
Musk claimed that publishing information about the location of his jet, or how to find it, violates his privacy in a manner that is akin to “doxing” and puts his family at risk. This might be a compelling argument if it weren’t for a few inconvenient facts that Musk chooses to ignore.
For starters, the information Musk claims violates his privacy is already publicly available through a website called ADS-B (globe.adsbexchange.com). The site uses flight information transmitted by federal law to show thousands of commercial and private aircraft flights all over the world. Air Traffic Control voice communications, which contain similar information about arrivals, departures and flight plans, are not encrypted either. Anyone with the appropriate radio equipment can listen in.Musk has thus far failed to opt into a program offered by the Federal Aviation Association that would limit some information about his aircraft from being made public. So clearly, he isn’t that troubled by it.
Moreover, the information tweeted by @ElonJet only revealed the airport where the jet was located. It never revealed details of the family’s travel itinerary, schedule, addresses or any other information that would allow someone to know with any specificity where Musk or his family were at any given time. That’s a far cry from doxing, which often reveals the addresses, phone numbers and emails of people’s private homes and workplaces for the specific purpose of harassing or intimidating the person being doxed.
In other words, Musk’s privacy argument doesn’t hold water. Given Musk’s now-obvious alignment with far-right extremism, we can almost hear President Joe Biden on the campaign trail feeling the need to call out this “malarkey.”
What Musk didn’t like was that the publicity about the use of his private jet resulted in criticism of him. For Musk, any criticism shatters his frail self-image.
This isn’t the first time Musk has made up ridiculous arguments in a sad attempt to counter criticism, disagreement or inconvenience.
You might remember in 2017, when he implied that people who use public transit are mass murderers.
Or 2018, when divers leading the rescue of a dozen young boys trapped in a cave in Thailand told Musk that they didn’t need his help or a silly submarine he wanted to use in the cramped, flooded tunnels. In response, Musk assigned his communications team to attack a local government official and accuse one of the divers of being a pedophile. When the diver threatened to sue, Musk paid $52,000 to a private detective to dig up dirt about the diver.None of Musk’s claims were true.
These are just a few of dozens of rants and raves that show Musk is essentially a toddler tyrant who throws temper tantrums anytime someone disagrees with him or criticizes him.
Most recently, he attacked Wikipedia for having a “left-wing bias.” It’s a silly accusation given that Wikipedia has an article called “Ideological Bias on Wikipedia,” which discusses the topic directly, acknowledges the potential for bias in a volunteer-edited encyclopedia and cites various academic papers exploring the subject. Musk could probably learn something from Wikipedia’s honesty and transparency if he weren’t already so convinced of his own brilliance.
Musk bought Twitter with the promise to allow all legally permissible speech on the platform. Yet that didn’t stop him from suspending @ElonJet or the reporters. His actions show that any discussion of “free speech” in relation to the platform is nothing but a ruse to obscure the reality that he and his extremist ilk are transforming Twitter into a nuclear-powered propaganda machine.
And his willingness to engage in propaganda has few if any limits. On Thursday, he turned to defaming a rival platform by banning the account of Mastodon and blocking links that direct to many Mastodon servers. Mastodon is a free, open-source platform, which allows anyone to build their own dedicated social posting platform and is widely perceived as an alternative to Twitter. Now, when Twitter users attempt to tweet a link to a Mastodon server, an error message pops up stating: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
This is an error typically reserved for links that are potentially harmful to Twitter users. Yet in this case it appears the message conveys the harm Mastodon is doing to Musk’s ego and his plans to transform Twitter into a personal propaganda machine that defames those he disagrees with.
