Elon Musk appears to have convinced the Twitter masses that he is their champion of free speech, with his recent appearance on the BBC providing yet another opportunity to burnish his bona fides in this regard.
“Who’s to say that something is misinformation?” Musk asked the BBC’s befuddled interviewer, “Who’s the arbiter of that?”
Good point and fair enough.
But the problem with this and all of Musk’s critical remarks about the very notions of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ is that Elon Musk’s Twitter is itself a signatory of the European Union’s so-called ‘Code of Practice on Disinformation’ and ‘the Code’ requires platforms like Twitter precisely to censor ‘mis-‘ and ‘disinformation’.
And ‘require’ here means require: as discussed in my previous articles here and here, the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) renders the commitments undertaken in the Code mandatory on pain of massive fines. As I have likewise documented in those articles, Elon Musk has repeatedly flagged not only his compliance with, but indeed his full-throated approval of the DSA.
How in the world is he able to square that circle?
