After Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, he became a vociferous voice for the First Amendment and a “free speech absolutist.”
He quickly rolled 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 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, founder and CEO of Telegram, near Paris on Saturday.
Police told local media they were investigating crimes – including fraud, drug trafficking and organized crime – on Telegram. It comes after some European countries accused Telegram of failing to moderate criminal content.
If there is a close counterpart to Musk anywhere in the world, it is Durov. The Telegram founder fled Russia to avoid providing user data for the Russian social media platform he founded in 2006, called Vkontakte. And he has repeatedly refused to restrict Telegram content related to the conflict in Ukraine and Gaza, or communications between groups considered terrorist by some Western governments.
“We can’t make messaging technology secure for everyone but terrorists,” Durov said in an interview with CNN in February 2016. “It’s either secure or it’s not.”
Such a message resonated with Musk, who in a series of posts after Durov’s arrest criticized the move as a violation of free speech.
“Liberty Liberty! Liberté?” he wrote in one post. “Dangerous times,” he wrote in another post.
Musk added the hashtag “FreePavel” when he shared a video of Durov praising Musk and his pro-free outlook during an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year.
“It is vital to support free speech that you forward X posts to people you know, especially in countries with heavy censorship,” Musk wrote to X on Sunday.
It also reposted a tweet from Chris Pawlowski, CEO of YouTube’s right-wing rival Rumble. Pavlovsky said in a post on Sunday that France had “crossed a red line” by arresting Durov.
Although Musk is a self-described free speech absolutist, he has a history of silencing his critics. He fired employees who disagreed with him and banned accounts critical of him.