By by Nicolas Creed | Creed Speech Substack
Elon Musk has been cheered by many on Twitter as a champion of free speech, having reinstated banned accounts from well known media personalities, as well as speaking out against the “woke mind virus” embraced by the western world’s morally (and financially) bankrupt governments. Taking such public stances that appear to go against the grain has garnered a great deal of support for Musk. Less is said about whether ‘X’ really is becoming a freer bastion of open discourse and non-algorithmically governed and suppressed search results. Whether or not shadow bans are still in vogue, albeit with an updated coding twist?
Recall this spiel from Twitter’s recently appointed CEO Linda Yaccarino in 2023?
Transcript (my emphasis added in bold):
Since acquisitions we have built brand safety and content moderation tools that have never existed before at this company and we’ve introduced a new policy to your specific point about hate speech called freedom of speech not reach so if you’re going to post something that’s illegal or against the law you’re gone zero tolerance but more importantly if you’re going to post something that is lawful but it’s awful you get labeled you get labeled you get de-amplified which means it cannot be shared and it is certainly demonetized.
Back to your direct point about Brands brand safety, so they are protected from the risk of being next to that content and it’s also why it’s really important to note that once a post is labeled and it can’t be shared and the user sees that 30 percent of the time they take it down themselves – staggeringly they take it down.
That sounds a lot like controlling the narrative, doesn’t it? Who fact checks the fact checkers? Granted, there is the feature of community notes whereby users can ‘add context’ to ‘misleading’ tweets. Based on Musk’s outspoken stance flavour of the month, do the safety and content moderation tools allow for anti-gender ideology / anti-wokeism posts to have both freedom of speech and reach, but perhaps not other anti-globalist narrative posts? Who moderates the moderators?
Case in point – novelist, playwright, political satirist, CJ Hopkins’ book comes with a ‘graphic content’ warning on Twitter in 2024:
All of the above fits in with the United Nation’s Agenda 2030 sustainable development goal 16:
Specifically, the whole narrative behind ‘countering hate speech online’ is driving corporate and institutional adherence to SDG goal 16:10 –
Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.
The UN site has undergone many revisions lately, and actually reading about the details of each SDG has been made more difficult. Instead, there are only icons such as the blue graphic I linked to above, then multiple links to offshoot reports. Read Full Article >
