After Elon Musk purchased Twitter and renamed it X, he became a vociferous voice for the First Amendment and a “free speech absolutist.”
He quickly dialed back moderation on the popular social media platform, allowing all kinds of content to flourish, some of it hateful, some of it controversial, some of it misinformation, but all of it largely unfettered.
“Moderation is a propaganda word for censorship,” Musk once said.
He reminded his millions of followers of this today after French police arrested Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, near Paris on Saturday.
Police told local media they are investigating criminal offenses — including fraud, drug trafficking, and organized crime — on Telegram. It comes after some European nations have accused Telegram of failing to moderate criminal content.
If there’s a kindred colleague for Musk out there in the world, it’s Durov. The Telegram founder fled Russia to avoid giving up user data for the Russian social media platform he founded in 2006 called Vkontakte. And he has repeatedly refused to curb content on Telegram related to the conflict in Ukraine and Gaza, or of communications between groups considered terrorists by some Western governments.
“We cannot make messaging technology secure for everybody except terrorists,” Durov said in an interview with CNN in February 2016. “It’s either secure or not secure.”
That sort of message resonates with Musk, who, in a series of posts since Durov’s arrest, criticized the move as a violation of free speech.
“Liberté Liberté! Liberté?” he wrote in one post. “Dangerous times,” he wrote in another post.
Musk added a “FreePavel” hashtag when he shared a video of Durov praising Musk and his pro-free-speech outlook during an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year.
“It is vital to the support of free speech that you forward X posts to people you know, especially in censorship-heavy countries,” Musk wrote on X on Sunday.
He also reposted a tweet from Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of Rumble, a right-wing rival to YouTube. Pavlovski said in a post on Sunday that France “crossed a red line” with Durov’s arrest.
While Musk brands himself a free speech absolutist, he has a history of silencing his critics. He has fired employees who disagreed with him and banned accounts critical of him.