After Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, he became a vocal First Amendment advocate and “free speech absolutist.”
He quickly relaxed moderation on the popular social media platform, allowing all kinds of content to thrive, including hateful, controversial and misinformation, all with little to no restriction.
“Moderation is a propaganda term for censorship,” Musk once said.
He reminded his millions of followers of this today after French police arrested Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov near Paris on Saturday.
Police told local media they were investigating allegations of fraud, drug trafficking and organized crime on Telegram, after some European countries criticised the platform for failing to moderate criminal content.
If Musk has any peers anywhere in the world, it’s Durov, the Telegram founder who fled Russia in 2006 to avoid handing over user data for Vkontakte, the Russian social media platform he founded, and who has repeatedly refused to curb content on Telegram about the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, or communications between groups deemed terrorist by some Western governments.
“You can’t make messaging technology safe for everyone except terrorists,” Durov told CNN in a February 2016 interview. “It’s either safe or it’s not safe.”
The message resonated with Musk, who has criticized Durov’s arrest in a series of posts as an infringement of free speech.
“Liberté, liberté! Liberté?” he wrote in one post. “Dangerous times,” he wrote in another.
Musk used the “FreePavel” hashtag when he shared a video of Durov praising Musk and his support for free speech during an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year.
“Forwarding X’s posts to your friends is essential to supporting free speech, especially in countries with heavy censorship,” Musk wrote to X on Sunday.
He also reposted a tweet from Chris Pavlovsky, CEO of right-wing Rumble, a YouTube rival, who said in a post on Sunday that France had “crossed a red line” with Durov’s arrest.
Musk has positioned himself as a free speech absolutist, but he has a history of silencing critics: He has fired employees who disagree with him and banned critical accounts.
