Elon Musk's Passionate Love Story with the First Amendment

May 08, 2022 | Written by Reema Gupta '22

As of April 28th, 2022, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, now owns Twitter. Musk himself has had Twitter for quite a while and has been openly critical about the app. Specifically, he finds the app’s content monitoring policy “too restrictive” and if you are a user, I’m sure you would find some truth to that statement. Once banned or suspended, it is extremely hard to get back on the app. Recently, the company had permanently banned former President Trump from the platform entirely, citing his hateful comments and “the risk of further incitement of violence” in reference to the January 6th riots. The banning was met with extreme backlash from his supporters and many started to once again criticize Twitter’s speech policies. The app itself has hundreds of pages in the handbook about what language is allowed and what isn’t. However, with the banning of former President Trump, many began attacking the company for “silencing conservative voices,” thus continuing the eternal battle of what free speech really means.

The issue is people aren’t in agreement over what “free speech” really is. Hate speech, such as slurs or other offensive statements, is still legal in the United States, but it is not tolerated on many apps. But, just because it is legal, that doesn’t mean you won’t get backlash when you make statements that are hurtful to someone. Twitter, although, has explicitly outlawed hate speech on their platform and anything they deem as falling under the jurisdiction of hate speech gets banned almost immediately. Obviously the app doesn’t want to be turned into a breeding ground for bigotry, but also, hate speech is usually banned on many different platforms because it decreases ad revenue. However, on Twitter, an app heavily involved with politics, it can be hard to deduce what is offensive to someone and what is just a political belief. Oftentimes, the two overlap, hence why many users believed that the app was unfairly targeting them.

Seeing this, billionaire Elon Musk has taken a stand in order to bring back the guarantee of “free speech” to the platform. He even invested $44 billion into this initiative. Musk’s idea of Twitter is one with minimal content restrictions, longer character lengths, and an edit button. He believes that in order to guarantee free speech, anyone should be allowed to tweet anything. While this is constitutionally correct, it would change Twitter drastically. Many users are naturally afraid of the sheer amount of bigotry that can be perpetuated with a severe lack of content restrictions. All of this goes back to the question of what “free speech” really is and how it is protected by the constitution.

The Musk Twitter saga is just starting and we have yet to see where it leads. However, this entire situation has highlighted the topic of “free speech.” Is hate speech still considered “free speech” if it insults individuals? Who should be defining what is “hate speech?” And, are content restrictions a direct denial of the first amendment?