OPINION | This article contains commentary that reflects the author's opinion.
There is widespread speculation that Elon Musk will fire numerous people who work at Twitter for their terrible job performance as it relates to ensuring the platform allows for free speech.
For example, just 19 days before the 2020 presidential election, President Donald Trump’s official reelection campaign account on Twitter was suspended for writing, “Joe Biden is a liar who has been ripping off our country for years” while linking to the NY Post exposé on Joe and Hunter Biden.
🚨 POLL: Should Musk fire people censoring speech at Twitter?
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Musk weighed in on the issue of Twitter suspending the NY Post just months before the election over the story, which has since been authenticated as truthful.
Musk attacked Vijaya Gadde who is considered “the top censorship advocate at Twitter” and famously gaslit the world on Joe Rogan’s podcast and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. Gadde is unhappy about Musk’s takeover.
“Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk responded. Take a look:
Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2022
So was suspending the president’s re-election campaign account 19 days before the election for simply tweeting that article. https://t.co/lks133I9Rj
— Mike Hahn (@mikehahn_) April 26, 2022
Will Musk fire Gadde? The answer is probably yes.
More on this story via Newsweek:
Musk has tweeted criticism of top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde, raising further questions about her future at the company.
Gadde is the platform’s head of legal, policy and trust and her teams are tasked with deciding how to moderate content. That has made her a target of criticism from the right, including after Twitter limited the reach of a New York Post article about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, in 2020.
“Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk tweeted on Monday.
His comment came in response to a tweet that included a screenshot from a Politico article that reported Gadde had cried during a meeting with the teams she oversees, shortly after Musk reached an agreement to buy Twitter for about $44 billion on Monday.
During the meeting with employees, she expressed concerns about how things could change at Twitter under Musk’s ownership, according to Politico. She also praised the work her teams have done and urged employees to continue working to do good at the company.
Gadde had played an instrumental role in negotiating the deal between Twitter and Musk, according to Politico. Her role at Twitter has seen her involved in major decisions, including the ban of all political advertising on the site and the banning of former president Donald Trump after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But Musk, the world’s richest man and a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, has indicated that he would loosen the platform’s content moderation policies and only remove content if it is required by law.
“By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law,” he wrote in a tweet on Tuesday. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
The more relaxed approach that Musk is proposing has raised concerns that it could lead to disinformation, hate speech and bullying running rampant on the platform. Gadde has advocated for ensuring Twitter’s policies protect users while preserving free speech.
“Freedom of expression means little as our underlying philosophy if we continue to allow voices to be silenced because they are afraid to speak up. We need to do a better job combating abuse without chilling or silencing speech,” she wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post in 2015.
