There’s a reason why we haven’t written much lately about the Media Research Center’s fawning over Elon Musk: there hasn’t been that much of it. In fact, it spent much of the summer largely ignoring Musk, doing only a handful of Musk-focused posts. A June 6 post by Tom Olohan cheered that “Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant conceded defeat in a weeks-long effort to force X (formerly Twitter) to censor content she didn’t approve of across the globe.” This was in relation to the snuff video of a bishop being stabbed during a church service that that Olohan, for some reason, really wanted people to be forced to watch.
Catherine Salgado gave Musk space in a June 21 post to walk back his insults of advertisers who don’t want to be associated with his increasingly toxic brand:
Tech mogul Elon Musk has defended and softened his previous comments refusing to crush free speech to please advertisers.
Last November, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) had told anti-free speech advertisers to “go f— yourself,” The Hill noted, but during a conversation with the CEO of a multi-national ad company, Musk walked this back a little.
“It wasn’t to — to advertisers as a whole,” Musk told WWP CEO Mark Read on Wednesday at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. “It was with respect to freedom of speech. I think …it is important to have a global free speech platform, where people from a wide range of opinions can voice their views.”
[…]Musk returned to his of argument that X is an online public square. “In order for X to be the public square for the world, it really got to be a free speech platform,” he insisted to Read. “Now, that doesn’t mean people can say illegal things. It’s free speech within the bounds of the law.”
Yet free speech concerns remain for X. Not only did X CEO Linda Yaccarino openly brag of censorship on X to please advertisers, but both she and Musk have espoused a policy of “freedom of speech not reach.” This means content deemed objectionable is suppressed.
Salgado doesn’t explain why racism, violence, lies and misinformation should never been blocked or corrected.
Salgado returned for an Aug. 12 Musk-fluffing post:
X owner Elon Musk condemned Big Tech and governments worldwide for their election-meddling censorship.
Over the weekend, Musk went on X (formerly Twitter) to argue that censorship threatens free societies. His words were particularly timely as the UK was making headlines for tracking down individuals exercising freedom of speech online, and Google was involved in a scandal over 2024 election censorship.
“Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. If the truth is suppressed, it is impossible to make an informed voting decision,” Musk wrote on Aug. 10. “The degree to which freedom of speech is being undermined around the world is extremely alarming.”
That was largely it for the MRC’s summer of Musk-fluffing. And it certainly wasn’t going to tell readers about the not-so-positive things Musk and Twitter/X did over the spring and summer:
- Musk sucked up to China again in order to gain approval for Tesla to sell its cars there. If you’ll recall, this is something the MRC used to hate Musk for before he got interested in buying Twitter. This may have something to do with the fact that Chinese EV maker BYD is crushing Tesla in the Chinese market.
- Musk vowed to allow anti-Semitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes back on the platform.
- Musk is cannibalizing his own companies, diverting thousands of AI-capable processors to X/Twitter and away from their original location of Tesla.
- X got caught again running ads on posts with offensive content, this time linked to more than 20 hashtags used to promote racist and antisemitic extremism, including #whitepower.”
- Musk and his SpaceX operation were sued by former employees alleging that Musk personally ordered their firing after they accused SpaceX of tolerating sexual harassment in the workplace.
- Musk whined that too many comic book characters have had their race changed, which he bizarrely declared to be “Nazi shit.”
- Musk’s estranged transgender daughter fired back at her father for insisting that she was “not a girl,” was figuratively “dead,” and he that he had been “tricked” into signing off on gender-affirming surgery. She further claimed that Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine.
- The grandmother of three of Musk’s children by the musician Grimes says that he refused to allow the children to make a trip to visit an ailing family member.
And we haven’t even gotten to Musk’s rampant election interference, which the MRC really doesn’t want to talk about. More on that soon.