How Bad Is Social Media Censorship? It’s Much Worse Than You Think.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the subsequent termination of the censorship ideologues and release of internal files is turning into a landmark episode in the battle for free speech.

I’m a huge user of Twitter and I was well aware of the pitfalls that could arise if you criticized the public health policy response to COVID, the conduct of the War in Ukraine, or the feeble-mindedness of the Biden administration; (I did all three). You could have the distribution of your messages limited (shadow banning), have your account suspended, or have “warnings” attached to your tweets that you might be spreading dreaded “misinformation.”

But, what I and others did not know at the time was how pervasive these practices were, how exactly they were carried out, and the involvement of the government in conducting the censorship. Now, thanks to Musk’s document dumps as reported in this article, we know the answers.

The censorship was widespread, it was conducted through a special portal that connected Twitter’s internal censors directly with the FBI and the White House, and the government played a huge role in identifying targets and particular content it wanted to be squashed. That last point is legally important.

Free speech is only protected under the First Amendment if the government is trying to shut it down. Censorship is perfectly legal if it’s being conducted by private parties and not the government. By showing the government link to Twitter, free speech protections should apply, and victims may be entitled to damages and other forms of legal relief.

This disclosure is valuable and gives some hope for the future. But, it’s too soon to claim victory for free speech.

Even as the journalists described in this article were testifying before Congress on the censorship abuses they discovered, the IRS knocked on the door of one of the witnesses.

The IRS claimed the matter related to an effort to file a tax return in the name of the witness. That’s a lie. Those tax return ID thefts happen all the time and the IRS handles them with a notice letter and the PIN to be used in future correspondence. There’s absolutely no need to knock on someone’s door with such a routine matter.

Obviously, the visit from the IRS is a blatant intimidation tactic. The government’s use of IRS goon squads to intimidate a witness shows that the struggle for free speech is far from over.

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