Elon Musk’s free speech absolutism is supremely flawed

By Adrian Wooldridge

Hardly a day goes by without Elon Musk trumpeting his belief in the absolute importance of free speech. He insists that “moderation is a propaganda word for censorship,” that posts should only be taken down if they break the law, and that a thousand flowers should be allowed to bloom, however ugly. If the social media site that he owns, X, is going to be a public square for the world, he declares, it has to be a free-speech platform.

Though Musk’s posts on free speech have increased in frequency since he got into a fight with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over X’s role in the country’s recent riots, there can be no doubt that they represent not only Musk’s core beliefs but also those of Silicon Valley elites. In 2019, fellow tech titan Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Georgetown University that we should “fend off the urge to define speech,” and, only the other day, he said that he regretted surrendering to pressure from the Biden administration to “censor” content related to Covid-19.

The argument for free speech absolutism rests on a belief that has hitherto been at the core of liberalism but is being undermined by the very social media that Musk lords. This is the argument that the battle of ideas leads inexorably to the triumph of truth over falsehood, democracy over tyranny, and the powerless over the powerful.

Just listen to three of liberalism’s finest. John Milton asked, “who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” John Stuart Mill insisted that truth would inevitably emerge from “a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.” Oliver Wendell Holmes reasoned that the best test of truth is its ability to triumph in the “free market in ideas.” The battle of ideas is good for democracy because it allows the best ones to win out in the public square. It is good for civil order because it allows everybody to express their disagreements before bowing to the democratic will. And it is good for the health of society in general because it allows the people to hold the powerful to account. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy,” Musk declares simply.

Yet free speech as practiced on X and other social media platforms currently fails all these tests. Sensational tweets travel further and faster than sober ones. Polarising figures attract more followers than judicious ones. The mechanisms available for debate — posting replies and correction — are weaker than the mechanisms for publicity.

In the physical world, most people are careful about the people with whom they associate. But in the virtual world they throw all caution to the wind. They listen to people they would refuse to be seen with in the pub, either because they follow them out of curiosity or, more likely, because the Twitter algorithm shoves them in their direction.

The traditional value of a social network is thus reversed: Rather than “cleaning” content and refining information, the system packages truth with falsehood and reputable sources with sleazy ones. Worse still: The user is no longer able to distinguish between real people and artificial voices. A study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University of 200 million tweets discussing coronavirus sent in the first few months of 2020 found that 45% of them were probably sent by robots rather than humans and were aimed at sowing division in America.

Twitter is therefore more likely to weaken democracy than to strengthen it. Britain’s recent riots were sparked when a user tweeted the falsehood that the man who had killed three girls in Southport was a Muslim refugee who came to Britain on a small boat. (Such rumors might have spread without X, of course, but the fact that the platform reaches so many people and puts unverified rumors next to respectable news sources in its feed ensured that it was even more lethal.) Foreign powers, particularly Russia, deliberately use misinformation, sometimes spread by malign actors and sometimes by bots, to magnify social tension, spread rumors and encourage cynicism.

When it comes to power, the old liberal ideal is turned on its head completely. Freedom of speech was supposed to make powerful governments accountable to the people. This is why America’s founding fathers singled out the press in the First Amendment for particular mention. But today power lies with the platforms rather than the government. The platforms operate across most of the world (though China is now behind a “great firewall”) according to principles that are understood by a small elite of people in Silicon Valley. X has 368 million monthly active users and Facebook more than 3 billion. Musk might consider himself a latter-day George Washington, but in fact he is much closer to King George III.

The deepest problem with social media platforms is that they are not public squares designed to promote open discussion and democratic deliberation. They are business enterprises designed to seek attention and promote engagement. Their most important metric is not the advance of truth over falsehood; it is the number of clicks, likes and retweets that posts get. And this number is not so much unrelated to truth-seeking and democratic deliberation as opposed to it: Polarising and sensational material provides us with the dopamine rush that we crave and encourages us to keep scrolling and retweeting.

There is a vital debate to be had about how we balance freedom with responsibility. To make any progress in this debate we need to dispense with absolutes (freedom versus tyranny) and instead bear in mind two subtleties. The first is that there are lots of different types of speech, from political speech (which most people agree should be protected) to commercial speech to intimidation.

America’s commitment to the First Amendment has not prevented it from imposing restrictions on non-political speech on the basis of truth or accuracy. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, controls what people may say when they sell financial products. The Food and Drug Administration lays down what must and must not be said about certain products. The Federal Trade Commission restricts “unfair and deceptive” speech relating to trade.

The second subtlety is that there are lots of different types of regulation from the comprehensive to light touch. I would be tempted to apply the British model of broadcasting to news-related platforms. To get a license to operate, British broadcasters have to prove they are “fit and proper persons” and have to agree to report with “due impartiality” and “due accuracy.” But for those who think that is too draconian, there are more modest measures — for example, obliging X users with large followings to observe higher standards than regular users or blocking well-known troublemakers.

All sensible societies impose restriction on people’s ability to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre. Yet a worrying amount that goes on social media smacks of exactly this. The old presumption that these platforms should be allowed to do whatever they like under the banner of free speech can no longer pass muster when they wield so much power and their commercial incentives so obviously conflict with the pursuit of truth.