If Elon Musk Wants Twitter To Have Freedom Of Speech, He Needs To Allow Freedom Of Reach

It turns out free speech under “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk is not so absolute. According to the new Twitter CEO, “freedom of speech” does not include “freedom of reach.” Musk said, “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized,” meaning users “won’t find the [offending] tweet unless [they] specifically seek it out.” In other words, Musk is keeping at least some of Twitter’s notorious shadowbanning practices. 

Not only is Musk continuing to limit the reach of certain users, but his perpetual ban of Alex Jones and suspension of Kanye West suggest violations of Twitter’s generalized “hateful conduct policy” have nothing to do with federal laws against harassment and threats and don’t care about upholding the First Amendment. Instead, what is and isn’t acceptable speech rests solely in the opinions of one tech billionaire. 

Before Musk took over, Twitter routinely shadowbanned, meaning it limited the influence of posts or entire accounts without notifying the user. For example, pre-Musk Twitter could stop users from seeing a particular person’s replies to tweets and finding a particular person’s profile in the search results. Twitter could also stop a user’s tweets from being visible in search results (even when searched word-for-word). 

Shadowbanning creates a loophole for tech giants to censor a user’s content or entire account without being held accountable because the user doesn’t even know he is being silenced. Free expression being distorted by the higher powers running Twitter’s backend is not really free speech. 

It’s unclear if Musk will keep Twitter’s old version of shadowbanning or adopt a new one. What we do know is that shadowbanning isn’t going away under Musk and that many accounts are still suffering, such as The Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis, who has been heavily shadowbanned since January 2021. If you follow Davis and search for him, his account appears. But if you do not follow him, his account will not show up in search results, even if you type in his username word-for-word. 

Musk has not made any updates to the app’s “debunking Twitter myths” page, where the company states, “Simply put, we don’t shadow ban! Ever.” This was a lie before Musk owned Twitter and it is still a lie now. The Federalist asked Twitter to specifically outline its shadowbanning policies via its communication team’s account on the app but did not hear back. 

The Twitterverse’s New Arbiter of Truth

We know a “woke” coalition of leftists who hated the First Amendment and were buddy-buddy with Democrats ruled pre-Musk Twitter. But who are the arbiters of truth in the Musk-owned Twitterverse? 

Musk claimed two months ago that an intellectually diverse council would decide whether to restore banned users such as Donald Trump (though if free speech is really “absolute,” the reinstatement of Trump and others would be a given). Yet today, Musk appears to be making many of the censorship decisions unilaterally — without a council or even Twitter’s policies to back him up. 

When asked about the banning of Alex Jones — the InfoWars founder who was recently