Did Elon Musk Actually Save Free Speech On X?

Censorship. The word censorship was used there by Scott. We've seen this reversal in Meta's attitude, Facebook's attitude that had been built up over a decade, where it almost felt like if you had sort of right-leaning views, or really any unaccepted views, and you posted those on Facebook, you would face maybe having the post deleted or your account suspended. This new world of speech, of free speech, and as it pertains to masculinity, do you think Elon Musk's decision to buy X, which I noticed, Scott, you'd left X, you no longer post or tweet on X anymore. Do you think Elon's decision to buy X is a net positive for society?

Net, yes, but I think what people hear when you say that is there's no problems with this system than, you know, compared to the ones we had before. There are definitely disadvantages to a free platform like X now, and one of them is inevitably, when you remove censorship, one of the things that censorship was doing was keeping all the deeply unpleasant people away from being able to shove things in your face, and that happens quite a lot on X. So, I don't enjoy that aspect of it. But I've always said that would be the price that we would pay for freedom. Freedom always has a price, and that's what we're seeing. As for Zuckerberg, his miraculous transformation into a free speech warrior is just wonderful, and I'm delighted to welcome him and the fact that the culture's shifting. And those of us who were being censored by people like him for years is actually winning the argument. Well, what it shows you is we've won the argument on free speech when it comes to the big tech platforms. And it's going to be messy. And I always said it was going to be messy because inevitably, when you create these large platforms that are algorithmically driven, where the truth and the moderate reasonable take is not what usually gets attention, you're going to see a lot of unpleasantness.

I value the ability to hear and communicate truthful ideas and facts over my own subjective feelings or someone said a thing I don't like or someone was racist or someone was misogynistic. I don't enjoy the fact that that happens, but I would rather that happened and also we were not being censored from saying, you know, COVID probably came from a lab in China, which we were. You know, the Hunter Biden laptop story isn't Russian disinformation. Actually, it's an important piece of information that American voters need to hear when they're making their decision about the election. And all of these other things that were being suppressed and censored across social media for years, they're not anymore, and I think that's a good thing and I think that's helpful. And if you look at, you know, to bring it back to the UK for a moment, Stephen, as you know, on Triggernometry, we've tried to cover the grooming gangs scandal and it is an outrage what happened in this country over decades. We've been covering that for years since about 2019, 2020 to very little purchase. And one of the reasons is it was just something that the media sort of covered and then moved on. When it actually should have been something we talked about on a daily basis until serious action was taken and we saw real change, real change in policing, real change in social work, real change in government, real change in the way that these racially aggravated hate crimes were treated.

Well, none of that was really being talked about seriously until Elon kicked up a fuss, amplified the voices of survivors, amplified the voices of companions on X, which he bought. And now the British government is forced to do whatever it can to actually address those issues to the extent that it will. You know, a lot of people will say it still doesn't go far enough. Well, if it doesn't go far enough, we now have a platform from which we can continue to have that conversation until there is the sort of inquiry and the sort of outcomes that people want to actually deliver real change. So, is that a positive? God, yes. God, yes. We needed that. Those women who were raped on a mass scale needed their voices to be amplified by someone like Elon Musk on a platform like X, which is now free, to the point where Keir Starmer is forced into defensive action. I wish that was around 30 years ago because a hell of a lot of young girls and women wouldn't have suffered the way they did if we had the opportunity to get that message out. So, God, yes, it's a net positive.

Just to pick up on that, Konstantin. I've had a question in my mind for a while regarding the scandal, which is horrific, I think something we all definitely agree on, is why has Elon chosen now? And why has he chosen Keir Starmer as the sort of central target of this flurry of tweets around the grooming scandals? Because there's clearly, you know, Elon's, I think, an individual which you can kind of see thinking in real time. Like if you go back through his tweets, because there's so many of them and they kind of come in these spurts, you can almost see what he's getting at. Is there an underlying reason why he's made this essential issue of the last couple of weeks?

I think there are several reasons. One of the reasons that it's happening now is actually most Americans were completely unaware of this issue until recently. I remember a year ago being at a private event in New York and somebody said to me, well, you know, what is the consequence of political correctness? Why are you so against it? Why are you so against censorship? And I talked about the grooming gangs and people were horrified. They hadn't even... And these are well-informed, educated people who are media savvy and whatever. So, one of the reasons is I think to a lot of Americans this issue is only coming to the fore now in front of their mind. The second issue, I think, is that Elon Musk understands what I said earlier, which is we have a global Western culture now. And so what happens in Britain matters just as much as what happens in America because we are symbiotic with each other now. When there's a restriction of speech in the UK, when we have laws about what people are and aren't allowed to say, that has an impact across the world. When you see the European Union trying to pass legislation about online censorship, that has an impact because if something exists in the UK and in many European countries, it's only a matter of time before people in America are going to say, well, look, they've got this in Europe, why don't we bring it over here? And vice versa. So, what happens in America affects us in Europe and in the UK, and what happens in Europe and the UK affects America. So, what Elon, I think, is trying to do is to say, 'We care about our civilization.' Elon doesn't really talk that much about the United States. He talks about our civilization, as I do, because I believe that we are now one thing to a very significant extent. Now, from our civilizational point of view, is it a good thing that mass rape gangs in the UK are being insufficiently investigated and treated improperly by the police and the government? No, it's not. It's a very bad thing. So, how do we address that? Well, we address that by putting pressure on the government of the day. Now, I don't see the grooming gangs as a party political issue. The Tories didn't really do anything about it properly, either, although there were individual members of the cabinet that tried to do something like Suella Braverman. But he's putting pressure on the government of the day. You can see him going after Nigel Farage of all people and saying Nigel Farage is not the right leader for Reform. So, he's attempting to shape British politics in the direction that he feels is the right person. I haven't even yet had a chance to interview him, which I really look forward to doing, because I think he's one of the great visionaries of our time, whether you like him or not. I think that's undeniably true. But my sense is he's trying to talk about all the things that we've been discussing, freedom of expression, the end of identity politics and the pursuit of meritocracy, a pioneering, inspiring vision of the future, which is why he's talking about Mars and a vision for our civilization that goes beyond the narrow squabbling that we do here on Earth. And the understanding that human beings are meant... we left the cave. We're not supposed to stay in a place with the walls closing in on us and feel like we're in decline. We're not supposed to be a civilization that has 1.5 children per woman and that is simply just leaving the planet Earth because we can't reproduce. We're supposed to look at the future with hope and optimism. We're supposed to say, 'I want things to be better. I want things to be better for my children. I want to have children. I want the vision of our society being one of positivity and optimism and a sense of a pioneering vision and inspiration.' That's what I think he wants, and I don't really see any of that in the current government in the UK, and I think he's right to go after them and say, 'You are destroying your country's economy, you're destroying its culture, you are destroying its sense of cohesiveness by allowing illegal immigration, you are destroying that sense of optimism and vision, and you're not saying to people, Let's build something better. You're saying, let's stay small. Let's play small. Let's not rise above our station.' And I think we need people like that, imperfect as they may be in all sorts of different ways, to drive our civilization forward, to say to us, 'There is an inspiring vision to which we're all moving,' as opposed to just sitting there and waiting to die, which is what we've been doing for far too long.

Yeah, I think Elon is, take him at his word. You know, he said a year ago that he was going to absolutely dismantle the woke mind virus globally and he was going to ensure meritocracy and free speech. And when he sets his mind on something, he has the ability to stay focused on it for a very long time to a degree most people can't fathom. You know, and he's absolutely willing to endure pain. He loves a fight. He obviously has the kind of mind that can't relax unless he's kind of grinding up against some gear as well. Like the way he works, he needs stress in his life. He needs a big enemy. He needs a big fight to engage with. And I think Keir Starmer just ticked all of his boxes as someone to go up against. I think what's interesting is we talk about these big tech... I love that Scott has previously talked about breaking up big tech and I think there's potential for that in the next four years. All of these guys, like Trump and JD Vance and all of them, have locked horns with big tech and they've come, you know, this is their chance to get revenge on big tech in the next four years. They could do a little, you know, you might see Google have to, you know, spin off YouTube or you might see AWS have to come away from Amazon or something like that. Who knows? But it's interesting that a lot of these big tech guys, they're probably cozying up to Trump because, you know, that could be on the cards as well.

There's been a lot of them, Trump back-kissing over the last couple of weeks. I think Trump's almost bragged about the fact that everybody's flown down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his butt and to cozy up with him. And there's now headlines saying that there's this tech oligarchy forming in the United States where Bezos and Elon and Zuck are all now friends and they stood behind Trump as this unifying force. Just to touch on a few points of that, but also on Konstantin's message that Elon is doing this for the betterment of humanity, to further humanity, his involvement with the UK, but his broader involvement in politics now. Scott, does that square with how you think about Elon? And I am quite curious to ask you why you made the decision to leave X and to go to Bluesky and Threads and things like that.

Let's be honest, they thought that before the internet. I remember watching all the 9/11 truther movies and all of that. But your point overall is right. I totally agree. And by the way, Elon agrees with you. When he bought X, he talked about the bot problem. He talked about the amplification of outrage. He hasn't done as much as I hoped he would have done so far, but I hope that they do address that because that isn't an Elon or an X problem. It's a technology problem of the modern world. The reality is that the more we live our lives online, the more you're going to have the problem of the ability of foreign governments, of individual people to create fake accounts, bot farms, etc., to influence the way we look at all of these things. And we're going to have to come to terms with that reality because it's a technological issue that we're going to have to solve for and we haven't yet.