In a recent virtual gathering on the social media platform X, tech magnate Elon Musk made a bold declaration.
Speaking to a panel that included journalist Jack Posobiec of Human Events, controversial radio host Alex Jones, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and Congressman Matt Gaetz, Musk stated that he would prefer incarceration over complying with U.S. government demands to censor American citizens.
Posobiec initiated the conversation by referencing the revelations from the Twitter Files, a series of leaked documents that exposed the social media giant's interactions with the government in 2020. He asked Musk, "Elon, you've said that you want to be working within the confines of the law, but the question is if that law is being enforced by the law enforcement agency of the FBI or the DHS and then they come to X and say 'these posts need to be censored, this information needs to be censored because we've determined, whatever it is, how does X make that determination?"
Musk responded by emphasizing X's commitment to transparency. "Basically we will see everything that is happening on the system and nothing will be hidden, that is the goal," he said.
Posobiec then pressed further, asking if Musk would consider making public any future interactions with agencies like the FBI or DHS, similar to the "defensive briefings" that led to the censorship of information related to Hunter Biden in 2020.
Musk's response was unequivocal. "We will be as transparent as possible," he said, "and frankly if I think a government agency is breaking the law in their demands in the platform I would be prepared to go to prison personally if I think they are the ones breaking the law."
Musk's acquisition and renaming of Twitter to X was driven by a desire to foster free speech on a platform that had previously been accused of suppressing and censoring American voices. Under the stewardship of Jack Dorsey and his successor Parag Agrawal, Twitter was alleged to have been influenced by federal government forces in determining what content to censor and label as disinformation or misinformation.
This was brought to light in the Twitter Files, spearheaded by journalist Matt Taibbi. The files revealed a September 2020 meeting where FBI officials guided Twitter executives in a "hypothetical" exercise to identify misinformation, using the Hunter Biden laptop story as an example.
When the New York Post later published their report on the laptop and allegations of influence peddling, Twitter executives dismissed it as "Russian disinfo."
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