Media Research Center intern Christian Baldwin ran defense for Elon Musk in a Feb. 16 post:
Australia’s Communications Minister threatened that X (formerly Twitter) will be in “big trouble” if it does not comply with the country’s proposed new censorship laws.
The Australian Financial Review reported February 12 that Australian Communications Minister and Member of Parliament Michelle Rowland is waging a “crusade” to address a “litany of recent issues” she claimed are afflicting X. These comments come as she pushes her “proposed mis- and disinformation laws” that will impose standards on what speech will be permitted online.
The laws will enable the Australian government to impose hefty fines on social media companies that violate standards set by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Note that Baldwin dutifully repeated his employer’s narratives by dishonestly portraying efforts to address hate, lies and misinformation as “censorship.” Baldwin went on to complain:
Rowland repeatedly called out X owner Elon Musk and his platform in particular as one of the main reasons why increasingly heavy-handed measures are needed. She reportedly noted that the platform reinstated 6000 previously banned accounts and brought up sexual exploitation concerns. “They will have to [change],” she told The Australian Financial Review.
This is the Australian government’s latest enforcement of censorship in a long train of abuses that have violated the natural rights of Australians and even some non-Australians. The Twitter Files exposed that during the COVID-19 pandemic Australia’s Department of Home Affairs flagged 222 tweets for Twitter to remove. One of the flagged tweets came from British-based molecular biologist Tanya Klymenko who pointed out some of the flaws of the COVID-19 PCR test and said that COVID-19 was made in a lab.
Note that Baldwin failed to disclose exactly what those tweets said that made them a target — namely, spreading dubious misinformation during the COVID pandemic, when accurate information should be prioritized over dangerous conspiracy theories.
But a few days later, the MRC expressed a twinge of doubt bout Musk — which have been fleeting in the past — after Twitter/X suspended the account of the widow of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny after he died in prison. Catherine Salgado actually suggested that Musk was a hypocrite in a Feb. 20 post:
X owner Elon Musk ridiculed “digital tyrants” even as his platform made headlines for wrongly suspending a high-profile account.
Musk proudly posted a “vulgar and sarcastic” condemnation of censorship from his Grok artificial intelligence (AI) Monday, Feb. 19, just before a report of apparently mistaken censorship occurring on his own X platform. X suspended the account of Russian political dissident Alexei Navalny’s widow. While Musk posted a laughing emoji regarding Grok’s characterization of “content moderation [a]s a steaming pile of horse manure, and the platforms that enforce it are nothing more than digital tyrants,” the post’s timing seemed ironic.
Just last month, X CEO Linda Yaccarino proudly boasted that the platform had censored millions of pieces of content, including undefined “hate speech.” Hate speech is a label often applied by leftists to anything with which they disagree. This could be partly in response to the European Union’s anti-free speech Digital Services Act, as Yaccarino posted just this morning that X “had a productive conversation with [EU Commissioner Thierry Breton] today to discuss” platform health and DSA “compliance.”
[…]Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Russian political dissident Alexei Navalny, who just died suddenly in an obscure Russian prison, found her account temporarily suspended Tuesday morning. Yulia had posted on her X (formerly Twitter) account a video in which she accused authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin of being guilty of Navalny’s death. While Yulia’s account was restored only 45 minutes afterwards, the suspension highlights the fact that censorship continues on X, despite Musk’s avowed free speech ideals. The X Safety team’s account acknowledged error in Navalnaya’s case, claiming the platform’s “defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged” her account.
Still, Salgado quoted her boss in whining that the Community Notes function Musk added to Twitter/X is “censorship” because it fact-checks people:
“The X platform should be exporting American principles, not importing Europe’s,” said MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris. “And while Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter at a time when government pressure on social media companies to censor came as a boon to pro-free speech Americans, the X platform’s continued use of Community Notes fact checks and further censorship creep is beginning to look much like the platform of old — this latest censorship ‘error’ not excepted.”
Salgado whined that Musk has apparently decided to take a more active role in moderating content after all, which of course she dishonestly framed as “censorship”:
But is Musk’s stated devotion to free speech also a “load of bull”? After all, Yulia Navalnaya is hardly an isolated example. Besides the daily censorship MRC Free Speech America routinely records on its exclusive CensorTrack.org database of X Community Notes fact-checks, which can carry demonetization penalties, other forms of free speech suppression continue on X. Yaccarino previously bragged of censoring content to please advertisers, and the platform also reportedly planned to launch a new 100-person moderation team in Texas.
As long as X continues to silence free speech, Musk’s endorsement of Grok’s call to “give a big middle finger to content moderation and embrace the chaos of the internet” rings hollow.
The MRC returned to the defense duty the next day, however, with a post by Nicholas Fondacaro complaining how super-rich people like Musk and Bill Ackman never face consequences for their actions:
It’s not often members of the liberal media openly whine, on-air about how they’re losing their ability to gatekeep the criticism their friends and allies received publically; let alone be so open about how they wanted those going around them punished for doing so. But that’s exactly what happened during the Tuesday night rage therapy session MSNBC’s The 11th Hour host Stephanie Ruhle and Puck News co-founder Bill Cohan took part in when they targeted investor Bill Ackman and entrepreneur Elon Musk for daring to be outspoken about things going on in the world.
Ruhle, a well-connected and well-off finance reporter and TV host with Ackman’s phone number, kicked off the segment with a pathetic attempt to rally populist outrage at the two. “America’s super-rich have been very loud lately on social media; complaining about pretty much everything,” she complained to Cohen. “But the ultra-wealthy have been trying to control the public discourse and policy since the dawn of time. How is that different now, that we’re just seeing now on social media?”
According to Cohan, part of the problem was that X no longer had a character limit on posts, thus allowing Ackman to write whatever he wanted (as if threads weren’t a thing). Without evidence, he claimed that Ackman was saying things so abhorrent that he would be fired from an employer if he wasn’t so rich:
He also unironically served up this complaint:
The MSNBC host also seemed to dabble in anti-Semitic tropes and dog whistles. She suggested: “Traditionally, people” like Ackman (who’s openly Jewish) “wanted to be like the Wizard of Oz. They wanted to be puppet masters pulling strings without having to face the public.”
The MRC, of course, loves to smear Jews as puppet masters, whether it be George Soros or Jeff Zucker. Fondacaro offered no evidence that Ruhle was specifically referencing Ackman’s heritage — he’s the one who put the “Jewish” word in her mouth.