San Francisco: Billionaire Elon Musk on Sunday vouched that his social media company X, formerly Twitter, will fight for maximum freedom of speech under the law.
Musk said that while his company follows the aforesaid policy, anyone working at X who does not comply with the principle can join “other social media companies who sell their soul for a buck”, he wrote in a post on X.
The Tesla CEO quoted a Washington Post article, which claimed prosecutors in German as saying that under Musk, X is complying with more requests from the country to identify users in hate speech cases, than before.
The article also claims that this is in contrast to other countries such as Turkey and India, where X continues to legally contest censorship demands.
“At the risk of stating the obvious, I don’t know what’s going on with every part of this platform all the time, but our policy worldwide is to fight for maximum freedom of speech under the law,” Musk wrote in a post on X on Sunday.
“Anyone working for X Corp who does not operate according to this principle will be invited to further their career at any one of the other social media companies who sell their soul for a buck.”
Recently, the Musk-owned X also filed a lawsuit alleging that a new California law requiring social media platforms to declare certain moderation practices is “unconstitutional” and a clear violation of the company’s right to free speech.
The law, called AB 587, requires social media companies to publicly detail moderation practices around hate speech, racism, extremism, disinformation, harassment and foreign political interference, TechCrunch reported.
In the lawsuit, X said through AB 587, “the State is compelling social media companies to take public positions on controversial and politically-charged issues”.
“Because X Corp. must take such positions on these topics as they are formulated by the State, X Corp. is being forced to adopt the State’s politically-charged terms, which is a form of compelled speech in and of itself,” the lawsuit alleged.
“AB 587 thus mandates X Corp. to speak about sensitive, controversial topics about which it does not wish to speak in the hopes of pressuring X Corp. to limit constitutionally-protected content on its platform that the State apparently finds objectionable or undesirable,” it added.
Responding to the lawsuit, California Assembly member Jesse Gabriel, and author of the AB 587 bill, said that it is “a pure transparency measure that simply requires companies to be upfront about if and how they are moderating content. It in no way requires any specific content moderation policies.”
The AB 587 bill was signed into law a year ago.
(IANS)
