While Elon Musk has regularly been a vocal supporter of free speech, on his social media platform X or otherwise, those he’s hired might not be feeling the same way.
Specifically, X CEO Linda Yaccarino released a statement on Monday describing new guidelines regarding how the platform will be dealing with “hate speech” henceforth.
Yaccarino’s statement begins promisingly enough, emphasizing the importance of X as a platform for what she calls “information independence.” She explains that to “drive humanity forward, society must empower people to express their thoughts, make up their own minds, but also draw the line at hate. This is tough to do, but absolutely crucial.”
But she takes her time before explaining how X in particular is going to “draw the line at hate.” She first explains to us plebeians that “there’s also a point when information independence crosses a line too, and that’s hate speech” (as if no one’s heard of that term).
And how will X combat this “hate speech”? In Yaccarino’s words, by opening “more lines of communication with groups dedicated to the safety of communities both in physical and virtual spaces. And we’ll keep going –this is not a check-the-box exercise for any of us – combating hate is a lifetime dedication.”
While this all sounds nice, conservative X users didn’t waste any time parsing through the nice-sounding words before sounding the alarm about what they could really mean.
Woke Societies, a conservative live streamer, shared the statement with the caption “Aka censorship will ramp up for any false flags and possibly another stolen election,” while other users such as Thinking West shared a similar sentiment, commenting “Aka we’re going to censor you more now.”
Aka censorship will ramp up for any false flags and possibly another stolen election. Got it.
— Woke Societies (@wokesocieties) January 23, 2024
Aka we’re going to censor you more now
— ThinkingWest (@thinkingwest) January 23, 2024
Another user pointed out how Yaccarino has been an executive chair of the World Economic Forum since 2019 (as the left-wing “fact-checker” Snopes confirmed). The WEF is a left-wing group dedicated to remaking the world in the vision of its socialist founder, Klaus Schwab.
Ahhh yes the wef lady wants to suppress free speech
— James🇺🇸 (@FadingxGhost) January 23, 2024
Before we really dive into the implications of Yaccarino’s recent statement, let us remember what our elites really mean by “hate speech.”
As a legal term, it’s nebulous and inconsistently defined, and in practice tends to boil down to “stuff I don’t like.”
In our increasingly left-wing culture, “hate speech” has included quotations from the Bible, reiterating the traditional moral stance on gay marriage and other degeneracies, opposing the chemical castration and mutilation of confused children, or saying any words, in any order, if you’re former President Donald Trump.
Clearly, “hate speech” is less a term for a particular kind of crime with a specific legal definition, like manslaughter or grand larceny, than a handy weapon for our liberal elites to censor and punish anyone who pushes against the establishment’s narratives.
Do you trust Linda Yaccarino?
And it’s social media giants, such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter before Musk took it over, that are most notorious for using arbitrary definitions of “hate speech” to silence voices that dissent from standard left-wing platforms.
Knowing the use and abuse of the term “hate speech,” the conservative users on X are right to be concerned that the same sort of information censorship that allowed the left to (“allegedly”) steal the 2020 election might be rearing its ugly head.
Could Yaccarino be trying to reinstate the draconian censorship that, in part, made Twitter so notorious before Musk took over, purged the workforce, and changed the name?
Musk has proven to be an involved, if mercurial, tech owner in the case of X, so maybe he’ll step in before Yaccarino gets too far in her apparent censorship campaign.
Until then, we might have to agree with one particularly grim summation:
It’s over, folks. We had a good run
— Jason McLaren (@theoutfitters23) January 23, 2024
“It’s over, folks,” the user wrote. “We had a good run.”
