Elon Musk contends he’s taking a stand to defend the First Amendment, a position shared by people across the political spectrum.
But many are skeptical about Musk’s opposition to New York’s Stop Hiding Hate Act, which requires social media companies to disclose how they monitor hate speech, extremism, and other provocative content.
After all, Musk himself has been accused of platforming racist politicians and movements like U.K. extremist Tommy Robinson and Germany’s AfD party, considered a threat to the country’s democratic order by its own intelligence agency.
Musk’s move to the right has led him to compare DEI initiatives to Jim Crow laws, call immigration “civilizational suicide,” and claim there is a war against white people in the U.S.
He follows some blatantly racist accounts on X — many of which had been banned by Twitter’s previous management — and subscribes to one pro-apartheid account which regularly disparages South Africa’s Black population while calling for power to be returned to whites. Musk grew up in South Africa when it was still under apartheid rule.
On Tuesday, X filed a lawsuit seeking to block the new law, arguing it would force social media companies to divulge “highly sensitive and controversial speech” that is protected under the First Amendment. New York Attorney General Letitia James, who would be in charge of enforcing the law, is named as the defendant in Musk’s suit.
The two New York state lawmakers who sponsored the Stop Hiding Hate Act called social media companies like X “cesspools of hate speech” and said the law did not violate the First Amendment.
Social media platforms such as X “have consistently failed to inform the public about their policies regarding hatred and misinformation,” Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Assembly member Grace Lee said in a joint statement.
That’s not exactly true when it comes to X. Musk, calling himself a “free speech absolutist,” removed bans imposed by Twitter on many far-right accounts, though some say conservatives were unfairly targeted. Misgendering, for example, could get you banned by the company’s previous regime.
Professor Laura Edelson, who teaches computer science at Northeastern University, told the BBC Musk has “significantly reduced the resources the platform puts into enforcing even the rules it does still have,” she said. “This is why, even though rules around spam haven’t changed on X, there is so much more floating around than there used to be.”
But Musk proved to be a selective warden when it came to free speech. While fringe account holders thrived, the world’s richest man capriciously suspended multiple journalists’ accounts and downranked tweets mentioning Ukraine and hidden tweets and even direct messages that contained words like “gay,” “bisexual” or “trans,” according to The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
And when an independent research group documented an uptick in hate speech on the site, Musk sued the firm behind it. That suit was dismissed.
Still, Musk’s laissez-faire approach to content moderation appears to be winning converts. In January, META founder Mark Zuckerberg announced it would “remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse,” saying “recent elections” drove the decision.
Musk’s attorneys expressed confidence they will be successful in turning back the New York law, which they argue mirrors a California law that sought to require social media companies to share their policies for handling hate speech, disinformation, harassment and extremism.
X filed a legal challenge against the state and reached a settlement in February with California Attorney General Rob Bonta that essentially gutted the bill.
The legal arguments X made then have been virtually recycled in its suit against the state of New York.
Deciding what content is acceptable “engenders considerable debate among reasonable people about where to draw the correct proverbial line,” the suit maintains. “This is not a role that the government may play.”
New York is essentially trying to “eliminate” certain speech it didn’t like,” X’s attorneys argue. Hoylman-Sigal and Lee said their bill does no such thing.
“The fact that Elon Musk would go to these lengths to avoid disclosing straightforward information to New Yorkers as required by our statute illustrates exactly why we need the Stop Hiding Hate Act,” they wrote.
