Twitter owner Elon Musk spent his Friday tweeting about a topic that gets conservatives censored on the platform. He voiced support for a new Florida law banning sex change surgery for minors. 
“Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life,” he tweeted. Twitter did not censor the tweet which was viewed nearly 22 million times, despite the platform’s rampant censorship of other users who criticize “transgenderism.”
Indeed, Twitter allowed Musk to publicly support the new Florida law banning hormone blockers and “gender reassignment surgery” but the platform censored Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for expressing the same beliefs. Just last month Twitter reduced the visibility of a video from the governor’s State of the State speech, according to a screenshot from Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik.
“Children are not guinea pigs for science experiments, and we cannot allow people to make money off mutilating them,” he tweeted. DeSantis was describing the story of self-described “former trans kid” Chloe Cole, who was forced to take puberty blockers at age 13 and attended his speech.
Musk originally promised to make the platform a beacon of free speech, but it appears that leftist Twitter employees working underneath him are still undermining his free speech agenda via excessive content moderation.
In March, an MRC Free Speech America study found that the majority (sixty-two percent) of documented cases of Twitter censorship under Musk’s leadership in CensorTrack.org’s database between Nov. 14, 2022, and March 4, 2023, were tweets critical of the transgender movement.
Ironically Musk launched his $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter precisely after satire site The Babylon Bee was banned on March 20, 2022, for a humorous tweet declaring transgender Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year” in 2022. It’s clear that the censorship of viewpoints that slam against the left’s obsession with gender dysphoria hasn’t abated under Musk due to his own staff undermining him.
What’s disappointing is that critics of the transgender movement aren’t the only ones Twitter is censoring. MRC Free Speech America research illustrates how the “de facto public town square” vision that Musk promoted for Twitter has not yet come to pass.
Twitter censored DeSantis just last month when he live-streamed his response to critics who opposed the expansion of the Parental Rights in Education Act. The proposed expansion included a ban on teaching sexual orientation or gender identity from pre-k through eighth-grade classrooms. The platform placed a sensitive warning label on the live stream and users attempting to watch the video had to click past a sensitive content filter to view it.
The overall severity of the censorship since Musk took over has been demonstrably worse, according to the MRC Free Speech America study:
“In 245 of the 293 (84%) documented cases of censorship on CensorTrack.org, Twitter locked users’ accounts, and in nearly all cases users were required to delete the content to regain access to their accounts. Under the old Twitter regime, by contrast, only 136 of the 226 (60%) documented cases of censorship consisted of locked accounts.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Twitter at (415) 222-9670 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.