Elon Musk has accused the US Democratic Party of attempting to censor citizens under the pretense of combating hate speech.
Elon Musk, a prominent American technology entrepreneur, has claimed that the US Democratic Party is trying to stifle free speech in the nation by claiming to fight against hate speech and misinformation.
His comments followed Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate between Democratic candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, where they discussed a range of issues, including free speech and censorship.
During the debate, Walz stated that he does not believe that hate speech, threatening language or misinformation are protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees US citizens the right to free speech.
“You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, that’s the Supreme Court test,” Walz said, referencing a 1919 quote from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Posting on X on Wednesday, Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, cautioned that “the Democratic Party openly wants to take your freedom of speech under the guise of what THEY deem to be ‘hate.’”
Meanwhile, during the debate, Vance argued that censorship, which was being carried out by major technology companies and supported by Kamala Harris and US President Joe Biden, posed a “much bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen in the last four years,” including the January 6 Capitol Hill riots, which the Democratic Party has consistently cited as proof of the threat to democracy posed by Trump.
“We do have a threat to democracy […] It’s big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens, and it’s Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she’d like to censor people who engage in misinformation,” Vance said.
The Republican VP candidate also accused the Biden-Harris administration of attempting to have Americans banned from platforms such as Facebook for criticizing government mask mandates for young children during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“That’s not yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, that is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American,” Vance argued.
In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the Biden administration had pressured Facebook to “censor” some Covid-19 content, and that the FBI had instructed the platform to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election.