What Free Speech? Elon Musk Endorses EU’s Highly Censorial Approach To Content Moderation; Which Twitter Has Spent Years Fighting

It’s becoming quite clear that Elon Musk’s approach to dealing with complex issues is not to actually understand the complex realities behind them, but to simply say what he thinks an audience wants to hear, and perhaps relatedly, to simply accept the last thing that someone presented to him as the official state of things. The latest in the long line of bizarrely contradictory and nonsensical breadcrumbs that Musk is leaving regarding his planned approach to handling content moderation on Twitter includes a full warm embrace of the EU’s highly censorial Digital Services Act, as tweeted by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market.

The video is pretty short, but here’s a rough transcript:

Breton: So we’re in Austin, together with Elon Musk. Thank you, Elon, for welcoming me.

Musk: Thank you. You’re most welcome.

Breton: Of course, we discussed many issues, and I was happy to be able to explain to you the DSA, a new regulation in Europe, and I think that now, you understand very well. It fits pretty well with what you think we should do on the platform?

Musk: I think it’s exactly aligned with my thinking. I think I very much agree… It’s been a great discussion. I agree with everything you said, really. I think we’re very much of the same mind and anything that my companies can do that would be beneficial to Europe, we want to do that.

Musk responded to Breton’s tweet by saying that “we are very much on the same page.”

Of course, the actual DSA setup seems extremely different than what Musk has said he wants regarding a platform that allows most speech. As we’ve discussed, the DSA, as currently construed would make something of a mess for speech online, and would put much more onerous regulations in place regarding how websites can moderate, and how much content they need to pull down.

I mean, just a few weeks ago, Breton was effectively threatening Musk regarding the takeover of Twitter, which is part of what precipitated this meeting.

Earlier in the day, Musk had once again (after falsely claiming that Twitter has a leftwing bias) tweeted that his preference was to “hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates.” Further saying “If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed.”

This is all nonsense on multiple levels. First of all, many, many countries are not actually democracies. So, laws are not always the will of the citizens. Secondly, in the US, we have things like the 1st Amendment that are actually designed so that Congress cannot pass a law that bans speech. But, most importantly, the laws of a country make a terrible guide for content moderation, because they’re really trying to serve two very different purposes.

But, even more to the point, this again demonstrates how little Musk really understands not just about free speech, but also about how Twitter aggressively fights for free speech.

Over the past few years, Twitter has actually been one of the leading companies speaking out about the very serious potential problems with the EU’s approach to speech in the DSA. It’s been a key player in explaining how the rules that the EU is looking to put in place could be damaging for free speech and also how the rules should be changed to avoid attacking free speech. And in walks Musk, with apparently little to no understanding of the details or the nuances, and just endorses the entire approach.

And, let’s not even bother getting into the fact that much of the meeting was actually to discuss other issues regarding Tesla and the EU, and how Musk notes that his companies (plural) want to do what’s best for Europe. People have raised serious questions about the business needs of Tesla in countries like China and India may run into issues with how Twitter is moderated, and now Musk is effectively announcing that if it’s good for Tesla in Europe, he’ll happily agree to much greater speech suppression on the site.

If you actually support free speech, it’s pretty damn maddening, because the last thing we need right now is a company like Twitter endorsing the current DSA approach, which would take a sledge hammer to certain speech rights. But, according to Musk, it’s all good, because it’s what the law says.