Elon Musk “Freed the Bird.” Now He’s a Threat to Free Speech.

The vision is already turning into a nightmare

Stephen Moore
5 min readDec 19, 2022

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Image: Edited by author

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

Those were the words tweeted by Musk — the self-professed free speech absolutist — earlier this year. It’s his deep passion for freedom of speech that led to him acquiring Twitter. (Well, aside from the minor point that he made an immature joke that proved very costly). According to one of the 1,245,537 tweets he has sent in the last few months, he believes it is important to the “future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.”

A very noble cause indeed.

But less than two months since his high-profile takeover in which he proclaimed he had “freed the bird,” his true vision for what freedom of speech on the platform looks like is becoming clearer by the day…

We’re free to speak our minds.

Until it upsets the man-child at the top.

The bird is no longer free

Let’s be honest. If you owned and controlled a social platform, it would be tempting to bend the interpretation of rules to eliminate bothersome…

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Stephen Moore

Writer, editor, part-time furniture maker. Subscribe to Trend Mill for critical takes on our dystopian metaverse hellscape future - https://www.trend-mill.com