If Josh Hawley and Roger Marshall want to crack down on Big Tech, start at Elon Musk | Opinion
There is a serious problem going on at X. Owner Elon Musk suppresses users’ speech at every turn when he disagrees with their political viewpoints — while at the same time he has been allowing illegal activities to flourish on the social network. Two prominent senators from Missouri and Kansas have targeted exactly this type of Big Tech misbehavior. Something is very wrong with this picture.
On Jan. 27, 2023, I wrote a blog post on my website titled “Judges Shouldn’t Be Riding Shotgun With Rogue Police.” There, I wrote about how judges across the country routinely protect rogue police activities against the citizenry, and how the judicial hierarchy doesn’t want the public to know about how it protects police corruption. X removed my post referring to the piece, and labeled and locked my account without any explanation or recourse for an appeal. The post was well supported with facts and should not have been squelched, but Musk’s service, with his heavy hand, arbitrarily suppressed my speech.
Musk talks a big game when it comes to discussing freedom of speech, but he doesn’t at all walk the walk. He has spewed on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast: “If you don’t have freedom of speech, people cannot make an informed vote if they’re just being fed propaganda, and there’s no freedom of speech, democracy is an illusion. So freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy.” That all sounds well and good, but unfortunately Musk doesn’t practice what he preaches. When it comes to X, there appears to be a different set of unwritten rules. While Musk attempts to portray himself as a champion of free speech, he is anything but.
While X has suppressed my voice, along with many others’, Musk at the same time appears to have no problem with allowing sex work activities to take place on X. As The Verge has noted, the social network is “still one of the few big platforms sex workers can call home.” I have to spend time on an almost daily basis blocking messages from obvious prostitutes who solicit business, yet Musk allows these accounts to operate, even though the service routinely blocks peoples’ speech for so called violations of “community standards” when he disagrees with their politics. Many times when I block an account, the same person reappears with the same lewd picture but a different handle — and Musk has to know it. How is it that he is permitted to allow these activities to flourish on his platform, since prostitution is illegal in all states other than in parts of Nevada where licensed brothels are permitted? Where is law enforcement?
To get an idea about what social media platforms such Musk’s X are actually used for, people should look at Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s book “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” “At a time when these platforms are determining elections, banning inconvenient political views, lining politicians’ pockets with hundreds of millions of dollars, and addicting our kids to screens, I want to draw attention to the robber barons of the modern era,” Hawley wrote in a press release. “That is why I am writing this book.” Hawley has frequently criticized social media giants for their alleged anti-conservative bias, but he also targets their monopolistic control of the online market — which is precisely what Musk has done with X. As he continues to enrich his already enormous bank account, he also is poised to become a shadow president in effect as co-chair of the incoming administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
In a Jan. 29, 2021, commentary in the conservative Washington Examiner, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall wrote that we should “fight now more than ever against impediments against our First Amendment rights, not allow Big Tech and its friends in and out of government to launch an assault on our rights in the name of protecting our country against an assault similar to the one that occurred at the Capitol earlier this month. … This new Congress must take a long, hard look at amending or removing the legal immunity afforded to Big Tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.”
Musk’s X got in trouble in Brazil for spreading misinformation and was banned until it paid a $5 million fine. The question begging for an answer here in the United States is why the platform is permitted to spread misinformation, lock peoples’ accounts and promote illegal activity. If Sens. Hawley and Marshall truly believe in what they said in their public statements regarding impediments against our First Amendment rights, perhaps they should hold hearings and make Elon Musk appear and answer for allowing the promotion of apparently illegal activities on X, while at the same time preventing Americans from expressing political views that he disagrees with.