Elon Musk’s absolutist version of free speech has thrown the world’s richest man and his X social-media platform into the crosshairs of governments worldwide.
In the U.K., officials are weighing tougher rules for sites like X after a surge of online disinformation fueled an outbreak of riots. In India, X was ordered this year to remove posts and block certain accounts in response to farmer protests. And in Brazil, Musk is in a running battle with the nation’s highest court over its orders to suspend users who had circulated fake news.
Taken together, the moves amount to a crackdown by some of the world’s largest democracies against what officials see as a wave of hate speech and disinformation. Yet any attempt to rein in social-media expression runs headlong into Musk’s hands-off approach to user posts, a "free speech" pledge that he defends ardently on the website formerly known as Twitter, which he acquired for $44 billion in late 2022 and promptly refashioned into X.
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