Elon Musk’s alleged fidelity to free speech is getting harder to maintain as his company continues to censor totally legitimate claims like the lab leak theory, which is supported by mountains of circumstantial evidence. Perhaps this is simply what you get for trusting an oligarch with deep connections to the military-industrial complex to protect a Constitutional right to free expression that should be guaranteed and enforced by the legal system.
The argument that Twitter is a private company that should be free to censor as it pleases (at the behest of government actors behind the scenes, of course, as was exposed by the Twitter Files) is fallacious. The platform is effectively the modern version of the town square where conversations of public import now largely take place. It should therefore be subject to Constitutional constraints on censorship, full-stop.
This argument is all the more relevant and correct given that the platform is granted legal immunity from lawsuits over speech expressed by users via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. If it wants to act as a curator of content, editing this or that, its immunity should be revoked and it should be subject to the same laws as traditional publishers.
Via AllSides (a media bias assessment company):
Twitter has blocked a watchdog group from placing advertisements promoting the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis on its platform, according to emails obtained by the Washington Examiner.
White Coat Waste Project, a group tracking federal spending that investigates National Institutes of Health grants, had 10 paid tweets and a video ad rejected on March 3 by the social media giant, emails show. Twitter alleged that the ads, which include claims about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the lab leak hypothesis, and taxpayer-backed animal experiments, make “distasteful references to COVID-19” and violated its “Inappropriate Content Policy.”
Via White Coat Waste Project (WCWP; an advocacy non-profit):
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Even under Elon Musk, the partisans, and parasites at Twitter are still abusing their authority and censoring the truth about animal testing in the #LabLeak and #BeagleGate.
Using the government’s own records, we first documented how Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded dog torture at home and abroad and how white coats in Wuhan wasted tax dollars on reckless gain-of-function animal experiments that President Biden’s FBI and Energy Department, former heads of the U.S. Food and Drug Association (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and even Elon Musk himself believe caused COVID.
Here, Musk is essentially endorsing the lab leak theory himself on Twitter:
He did it via a pass-through organization (EcoHealth)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 26, 2023
Related: Twitter’s Middle Management Problem Exposed by Treatment of Daily Wire’s Documentary
In Musk’s defense, it’s unlikely that he went out of his way to personally censor the lab leak theory proffered by the WCWP. As I have written previously, Twitter is besieged on all sides by World Economic Forum and Deep State cutouts. They didn’t magically disappear when he assumed ownership.
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