3 Big Questions Elon Musk Should Answer About His Plans For Free Speech On Twitter

Anyone who had high hopes Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover would usher in sweeping change and transform the platform into an authentic digital public square for robust, freewheeling debate should have had their hopes smashed earlier this week after a series of Musk tweets outlining his plans for the newly formed Content Moderation Council (which sadly I will probably not be asked to join despite my overwhelming qualifications for the job).

In short, Musk is relying on a group of mostly left-wing activists with strong authoritarian instincts to guide Twitter’s policies on content moderation — or, as Musk put it, adopting the language of the left, “to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies.” So much for free speech absolutism.

The very existence of the Content Moderation Council should set off alarm bells for anyone who cares about free speech on Twitter. As we all know by now, “content moderation” is a crude smokescreen employed by the left to throttle opinions and arguments they don’t like, much like “fact-checking” is dishonestly used by media outlets to do the same.

With that in mind, here are three big questions Musk should answer about his plans for free speech on Twitter.

1. Why Hasn’t Musk Fired the People Who Orchestrated the Suppression of the Hunter Biden Laptop Story?

Although Musk quickly fired top Twitter executives such as CEO Parag Agrawal and policy head Vijaya Gadde, who was one of the chief advocates for speech censorship on the platform, he kept people like Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, who played a major role in the company’s suppression of information about Covid-19 and the 2020 election.

It was Roth, for example, who greenlit Twitter’s decision to ban the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the election. In May, Roth rolled out Twitter’s “crisis misinformation policy,” whereby Twitter slaps warning labels on tweets deemed to contain “misinformation” — another meaningless term that serves as a crude pretext for censorship — to prevent them from being widely seen during times of armed conflict, natural disasters, or public health emergencies. He also has a long history of nasty, hate-filled tweets, like when he referred to Trump administration officials as “actual Nazis” in 2017.

Called out by Liz Wheeler about why he hasn’t fired Roth, Musk replied, “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.”

But Musk is side-stepping the question. Roth’s “questionable tweets” aren’t the main problem, it’s his zeal for censorship and his lack of integrity. After all, if Roth had any integrity, he’d publicly admit he was wrong about the Hunter Biden laptop story and offer Musk his resignation. Until Roth, at least, is fired, there’s no reason to take seriously Musk’s performative genuflections to free speech.

2. Is Musk Going to Have Even a Single Conservative on the Content Moderation Council?

As my colleague Jordan Boyd noted on Wednesday,