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The power of the broligarchy grows as new reporting comes out that Elon Musk, who runs a government department called DOGE and thus can be seen arguably as the government when he speaks, pressured Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on content moderation.

“Elon Musk pressured Reddit’s CEO on content moderation.

Not only has Musk been waging a months plus long campaign on his social media platform X against content posted on Reddit, but “he was also privately messaging Reddit CEO Steve Huffman,” The Verge reported today, based on sources they cite as familiar with the matter.

Musk was angry that after his “Nazi” salute at Trump’s inauguration, some subreddits banned links to X (formerly known as Twitter).

When that didn’t change anything, the Verge notes he “posted that Reddit users advocating for violence against Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees had “broken the law.”

In February of this year, the BBC reported that Reddit had “temporarily banned one of its communities - and removed another - after X owner Elon Musk claimed comments made by the site's users about his employees were breaking the law.”

This happened after a subreddit that posts funny posts from Elon’s social media platform “posted comments calling for violence against members of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (Doge)” while “responding to reports which suggested some Doge staff have been granted access to sensitive personal information of millions of Americans.”

But it turns out Reddit banned hundreds of comments that did not call for violence or doxxing, according to today’s reporting in The Verge:

Shortly after the two CEOs exchanged text messages, Reddit enacted a 72-hour ban on the “WhitePeopleTwitter” subreddit that hosted the thread about DOGE employees, citing the “prevalence of violent content.” The specific threadMusk shared on X was also deleted, including hundreds of comments that didn’t call for violence or doxxing. (So far, Reddit doesn’t appear to have intervened in any moderator decisions to ban X links from the subreddits they oversee.)

In other words, Elon Musk illegally took our private information and then went crying to the CEO of Reddit because people were angry about his theft of their private information.

Publicly calling for violence is not okay and Reddit is a publicly traded business that can set that limit on “free speech” wherever it choses because it is NOT the government, but it is notable that there are hate reddits that appear to dox other public figures and comments plotting against children that Reddit seemingly does not take action on.

So the real issue here is not that some people called for violence, but that Reddit took action to silence hundreds of commenters who did not call for violence after the head of a government agency contacted their CEO to complain about people who were upset about him breaking into systems and stealing their private information.

Is Elon the Government?

And here’s the crucial part, because again, Elon Musk runs DOGE and thus when seeking to silence free speech, he is arguably speaking with the authority of the government.

Trump has publicly said Musk is the head of DOGE, but in court filings the White House denies this, even as Musk is announcing the policies and decisions and standing next to the Resolute Desk during announcements.

They want to have their cake and eat it, too, but in action, words, and deeds Elon is the head of DOGE. He announces government policies on his X account.

That means that this is arguably a real instance of the government seeking to silence free speech, unlike the laughable cherry picked data from Musk’s self-pitying “Twitter Files” debacle.

And it worked.

Hypocrisy and Gaslighting

… how the turntables have turned.

Elon Musk has previously made a public fuss in defense of what he called free speech. “In 2024, he responded to a video of a person purportedly being arrested for offensive comments online by asking ‘is this Britain or the Soviet Union?’,” the BBC reminded readers.

Musk also put on that big show of the “Twitter Files,” which got me and a few other journalists written about (shamed?) for calling out those who carried out stenography for a billionaire.

One of the false narratives of the Twitter Files was that the government had “illegally coerced Twitter into censoring a 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden.”

Here’s Elon claiming that it’s a violation of the First Amendment for the Biden campaign (which was not the government at the time) to request the takedown of nonconsensual nude photos of his son that violated the platform’s own rules via CNN:

“If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” he said of a screenshot purportedly showing Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020 asking Twitter to review several tweets it suggested were violations of the company’s terms. Some of the tweets in question included nonconsensual nude images that violated Twitter’s policies.

Back then, Twitter was not the government, but Twitter’s own lawyers proved Elon wrong about his claims.

But also… “the Twitter Files also show the Trump administration made its own requests for removal of Twitter content.”

So the Trump administration, which was the actual government, made requests for removal of content and that was fine with Elon. But Joe Biden’s campaign reaching out to Twitter to get revenge porn of his son taken down is a violation of the First Amendment according to Musk.

Musk’s view is basically it’s okay when his team does it but not okay when the other team does it, but also when his team does it for real it’s not as bad as when the other team doesn’t even really do it.

FREE SPEECH

Free speech is the idea that individuals or communities have the right to express opinions without fear of retaliation or censorship, and in the United States specifically the First Amendment protects freedom of speech and strongly protects it from government restrictions.

The courts have found that freedom of speech includes (but is not limited to, these are but a few examples) the right to use certain offensive words and phrases to convey political messages and even to burn the flag in protest and other forms of symbolic speech. It does NOT include other protections, including not protecting inciting imminent lawless action.

Let’s all take a moment to acknowledge that writing something like, “I’m ready to fight deforestation!” is not inciting imminent lawless action, but is an example I recall seeing on a Reddit thread about comments that were being banned under the new rules.

Criticism and gathering together to protest are legal actions protected by the Constitution. Elon Musk being a the head of the Department of Government Efficiency as a “special government employee” and also as someone who makes millions every day from federal contracts should not be silencing the speech of anyone on any platform.

This is exactly the kind of situation the First Amendment protects.

A few hours after that article was published, Reddit was down for a brief time, but they say a “fix” has been implemented.

Government Efforts to Silence Criticism

What does this all mean? One way to look at this is it’s a clear attempt to stifle the protests that have taken successful aim at Telsa thus far, most of which have been peaceful although there are individuals who are not part of the nationwide “Tesla Takedown” protests who have taken to burning Teslas. But that is happening around the globe, not just here.

Why would the richest man on the planet care about what a bunch of Redditors were saying? Why would he be so obsessed with their contempt for him and his very real attacks on their freedoms so much so that he would rant about it for nearly two months on X and then demand the CEO address his hurt feelings?

Maybe because the genuine outrage and the grass roots protests are slowing down the damage he is trying to inflict on everyone. Or maybe he has psychological limitations that make criticism impossible to hear, after all this is the man who reportedly broke down in tears over perceived “sleights” to SpaceX. Or maybe he’s concerned that his method of using hopium propaganda to keep Tesla stock flying isn’t working as well as it used to.

Whatever his reasons, though, the bottom line is this is the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech. They do not respect the fundamental freedom of free speech. They do not respect what makes America great. They want to silence everyone who disagrees with them because they seek the ultimate, unlimited and unchecked power.

What do you think about Elon Musk’s censorship efforts? Join the discussion in the comments below.

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