In a bold twist, Twitter’s Community Notes censored Elon Musk and had the gall to tell him what he can and cannot do with his own platform.
Community Notes, the crowdsourced fact-checking system for X (formerly known as Twitter) that has been characterized as “censorship by a different name,” took aim at owner Musk’s announcement that he will soon remove X’s block feature. The Note attached to his post, however, claimed that he is forbidden from making such a change.
Proving that no one using X is immune from censorship, the platform applied a Community Note to one of Musk’s own posts.
In his announcement today Musk posted what immediately proved to be one of the most controversial moves he has made since taking over the company. “Block is going to be deleted as a ‘feature,’ except for DMs,” he posted.
The Community Notes team quickly came up with a Note rebuking the latest potential change that now appears below Musk’s post. The Note reads: “Elon Musk cannot do this. The feature to block someone on the site is REQUIRED as a social media app to be allowed on the App Store and the Google Play store.” It also provides links to the app guidelines for both the Apple App Store and the Google Play store as proof.
While Musk has not yet responded to this allegation, he did clarify in a later post that “You will still be able to mute accounts and block users for DMs.”
Musk has made many changes to X since he purchased it. One of the more controversial changes was a global rollout of what is known as Community Notes in December of 2022. MRC Free Speech America’s CensorTrack recently reported that this new form of censorship caused Secondhand Censorship to soar in the second quarter of 2023.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives 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 using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.