Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is exiled in Russia, said on Friday that censorship on Twitter and other social media had become excessive, depriving users of the right to make their own decisions regarding content.
Snowden's comment was in response to the news SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk had bought Twitter. Musk, who has criticized Twitter for limiting freedom of expression in the past, hinted that he finalized the platform's purchase in a tweet earlier on Friday reading, "the bird is free."
"This is going to cause controversy, but platform censorship had clearly gone too far. Content moderation should be an individual decision, not a corporate prison. Let people make their own choices — and not just on Twitter," Snowden tweeted.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter announced back in April was delayed in July by legal disputes between himself and the company about the number of fake accounts on its social media platform, which Musk alleged was much higher than the company reported.
On Thursday, the billionaire shared a video on Twitter showing him moving into the company's headquarters holding a sink, indicating that he had finalized the deal.
Immediately after taking over, Musk removed several top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, Legal And Policy Head Vijaya Gadde and General Counsel Sean Edgett. According to the Washington Post, the fired executives were “hastily escorted out of the company’s San Francisco headquarters.” Musk’s takeover of Twitter and his push to turn it into a “free speech” haven has raised concerns about the return of unmoderated hate speech on the platform. Musk tried to assuage some of these concerns raised by advertisers in a statement issued on Twitter, in which he said he won’t allow the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.” The billionaire also claimed he was not trying to make more money with the Twitter acquisition but instead is trying to “help humanity” by creating a “common digital town square” for open dialogue.
Address freedom of speech concerns One of the most contentious issues around the Twitter deal, back when the world’s richest man initially expressed interest in buying it, was Musk’s concerns around free speech. He is a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who has raised concerns about the platform downplaying certain posts with its algorithms that curate what a user sees. In an interview before he agreed to buy the business, he raised concerns about “having tweets mysteriously be promoted and demoted with no insight into what’s going on”. An open-source algorithm could address this, he suggested.
A cache of texts disclosed in a filing at the end of September, when Twitter was taking Musk to court in Delaware over his attempts to try to back out of the deal, gave further evidence of his concerns. The podcaster Joe Rogan asked the Tesla chief executive in April – after his acquisition of a stake in the company had been revealed – whether he would “liberate Twitter from the censorship happy mob”. Musk replied: “I will provide advice, which they may or may not choose to follow.”
The same cache showed Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of the media group Axel Springer, which includes Politico, urging Musk to make Twitter “censorship free” and create a “marketplace for algorithms” so that “if you’re a snowflake and don’t want content that offends you, pick another algorithm”.
Another text recommended hiring a “Blake Masters type” – a reference to the Trump-backed Arizona Senate candidate – as “VP of enforcement”.
In a note on Thursday to advertisers, Musk said that he acquired Twitter because he believes it’s important for the “future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner”. However, he conceded that the platform cannot become a “free-for-all hellscape”. “In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all,” he wrote.
Musk has also said he is against censorship “that goes far beyond the law”, but legislation is changing in the UK with the online safety bill (although its freedom of speech provisions might now be tweaked) and in the European Union with the digital services act.
A corollary of Musk’s free speech stance is that people banned from the platform could get their accounts back. The former US president was removed in January 2021 following the Capitol riots and Musk has said he would overturn that. Asked in May about Trump, he said: “I would reverse the permanent ban,” adding that Twitter was “left-biased”.
Other figures banned from Twitter include the US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and, in the UK, the rightwing commentator Katie Hopkins.
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