May 22, 2024 - 4:00pm
When iconoclastic billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 he promised to restore free speech to the social media platform, whose previous regime had censored content and banned users practically indiscriminately. In the years since, Musk has faced questions about whether his policies are consistent with his bold promises — a criticism that has been reinforced by his recent treatment of the word “cisgender”.
Musk is clearly no fan of the term, which is often abbreviated to “cis” and used by social progressives to denote someone who is not transgender. He has called it a “slur” and announced some months ago that its repeated use would be treated as a violation of the harassment policies at X, as it’s now known. Now, users who post the term are reportedly seeing their posts restricted.
As TechCrunch reports, “If you write the words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ on X, you might be served this full-screen message: ‘This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and could be used in a harmful manner in violation of our rules.’ You can continue to publish the post or delete it.”
If you do go forward with posting something using the term “cisgender,” you may see the visibility of your post heavily limited.
There’s no disputing the fact that this is ideological language only really used by very-online progressives or in activist spaces. Yet whether “cis” constitutes a slur is ultimately a matter of opinion that almost misses the forest for the trees. The more crucial point is that even slurs are well within the bounds of free speech.
After all, Musk has repeatedly stated that his standard for allowing “free speech” on Twitter will simply be allowing all speech that is lawful in a given country. In the US context, the First Amendment governs citizens’ legal standards for free speech, unambiguously protecting “hate speech” including slurs.
So it seems that Musk is making a giant exception to his standards and cracking down on certain words that personally bother him. And, unfortunately, it’s not the first time since taking over Twitter that the billionaire’s actions have failed to live up to his words. He has also banned certain controversial anti-Israel slogans such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” and “decolonization”, even though they, too, while understandably controversial, are unambiguously protected by the First Amendment.
The X owner further suspended many journalists, myself included, for sharing accurate information about a planned “Transgender Day of Vengeance”. And he intentionally throttled links to Substack to the point of near-invisibility over his frustration with the company’s business decisions.
These are just a few examples of many where Musk has talked the talk about “free speech absolutism” but not necessarily walked the walk.
It’s wonderful to have someone in charge of a major social media platform who says they believe in free speech. And, to be fair to Musk, he has made some changes that do advance that goal. Yet if the billionaire really wants to be a free speech hero, he can’t keep making exceptions for things that hurt his feelings.
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SubscribeForced speech is not free speech.
Aye. Neither is anonymous speech.
What I’m wondering is whether or not this author was complaining a few years back when Twitter/X was doing the exact opposite, labeling certain right wing terms and viewpoints as ‘slurs’ and ‘hate speech’ and censoring based on that. If he was standing up for free speech back then, then I say kudos to him and keep fighting the good fight. If he wasn’t, then he’s a hypocrite who can’t be taken seriously complaining about this now, just as much as Musk is a hypocrite for standing up for free speech then only to resort to censorship now. Accusations of hypocrisy are a double edged sword and should be handled with sufficient care.
In my view the author is not defending ‘free speech’ per se, but pointing out that Elon is not defending ‘free speech’ very well. Whether the term is derogatory or not… so what?
Oh I agree. Elon isn’t defending free speech as completely as he should. He’s been somewhat of a disappointment of late to me anyway. He strikes me as just another rich guy trying to use political sentiment to make money. It can’t have escaped Elon’s notice that Fox News went from nothing to the most popular and profitable cable news outlet in just a few years. Conservatives love to complain and a lot of them, being older, have more money to complain with. A bunch of broke college students and young people with student loan debt in the tens or hundreds of thousands is hard to monetize. A bunch of retirees with pensions and middle aged folks with established careers constitute a much more stable and profitable customer base. Having pretended to be a green environmental nut and technology geek long enough to get favorable treatment from liberals and benefit from massive government handouts for electric cars and other such ‘green’ technologies, he’s now pivoting to a better long-term economic strategy. I suspect he knows just as well as most of us that EV’s are not going to be a long term solution. He’s already pivoted Tesla from being the electric car company to being a ‘self driving’ car company. He’s adapting to to the changing political and economic conditions and putting his personal economic empire on more reliable footing. He’s no champion of free speech. I didn’t buy his act back when he was talking about protecting the planet and colonizing mars and I don’t buy it now either.
I suspect none of this bothers him in the least. He’s just acting, manipulating people to gain advantage. It’s been rumored he has Asperger’s or some other form of autism. So do I. If that’s true and he’s like me, both his former and past public personas are just projections that he uses to gain social acceptance and temporary advantage. People with Asperger’s learn to ‘fake normal’ at some point, and once you can fake normal, you can fake other things to. I know I personally can read a room of people politically based on their clothing, accents, mannerisms, ages, etc. and slant my comments towards their political sensibilities. I can do other things too. One of my favorite tricks when I encounter someone I don’t really want to talk to and am unlikely to encounter again is to make my speech and manners rather goofy so I appear to be somewhat dim, and from a certain point of view, that’s somewhat true. Elon just has a larger audience. Whatever his real personality is like, it’s likely nothing like any of his public personas, and he only shows it when there aren’t any cameras around. Doesn’t he have a wife and several kids at this point? That’s who gets to see the real Elon. Everything else is probably an act and that won’t bother him in the slightest. So I do get why Elon confuses people, especially more intelligent and observant sorts of people such as this author.
So that’s my take on Elon himself. What I was going for in my comment was to point out that Twitter was doing this before Elon took over the company to a much greater extent. What he’s doing now is no worse and to my mind a considerable improvement over what was going on before he got there. It’s just slanted a different direction. The fact is Twitter and some of the other tech giants went all-in on the crusade against Donald Trump. I don’t know why they did it. I don’t like Donald myself but I have never understood why some people and media outlets seem so obsessed with destroying him at any cost. I’ve never thought he was worth the colossal amount of effort the establishment and media has spent trying to destroy him or the long-term damage they’ve done to important concepts like free speech. He’s a huckster and a charlatan and his snake oil salesman schtick should be ignored for the nonsensical circus act it is, not held up as some existential threat to democracy. He’s not even a real populist, a real Republican, or a real anything. The response to Trump has been many orders of magnitude worse than Trump himself. I’m guessing this author never said had anything to say back in 2018 about that. If he did, then he has been consistent and I’m in the wrong and I apologize.
If you do go forward with posting something using the term “cisgender,” you may see the visibility of your post heavily limited.
Musk is being transparent about what is acceptable on his platform. That is fine, and is completely different from what the old Twitter/Facebook/etc sites were doing. The leftists hide their actions behind flowery language or simply a veil because they know damned well that their policies are not well received by the public.
Excellent point which I neglected to mention. If there’s an announcement regarding the matter, it’s hardly fair to label it a ‘shadow ban’. What they were doing before Musk got there was more worthy of that particular criticism. .
‘Cisgender’ is not offensive per se, but it is generally disliked because it capitulates to the language of queer theory scholarship which seeks to normalize perverse* sexual conditions.
*’Perverse’ here meaning non-standard rather than morally bankrupt.
“Morally corrupt” is what you’re looking for.
You and Julian are the same, morally corrupt.
What the paraphilia are you talking about?
“‘Cisgender’ is not … than morally bankrupt.” <– The word cisgender only gives you hives because you want to pretend transgender people do not really exist to be abused by you, but are mentally ill cisgender people.
Because you are child abuser who wants to force some girls to have beards and deep voices and you want to force some boys to have breasts and deep voices, you are the mentally ill one.
And you are morally bankrupt.
Transgender freaks are .004% of the population. Why does the media spend so much time on them?
because of big big money.
I regard anyone who claims that children are transgender with the same skepticism as someone who tells that me their dog is vegan.
“‘Cisgender’ is not offensive per se” I find it offensive. It assumes (1) everyone ‘has’ a gender (2) those of us who are not ‘trans’ are but a subsection of our sex.
The author needs to understand that just as left-wingers for decades argued for free speech to get ‘their side’ towards power, the right is now doing the same. There is no need to cry about it just because you got suppressed. You are just on the receiving end of it for the first time in your life. Imagine being in the place of a right-winger and having had this happen to you for decades.
If you do go forward with posting something using the term “cisgender,” you may see the visibility of your post heavily limited.
Musk is being open. The leftists had to be sneaky because they know they are doing something wrong.
The left dominates everything, including the media in all its forms, academe, Big Tech and, well, one could go on and on until the pubs close and open again. This tiny push back I find very welcome.
Understandable but unwelcome.
You one of them, then? Or just a useful idiot?
I’m growing to like this Musk character
Like him, in this you are contemptible.
Who is looking after the cats while you make a fool of yourself?
I bathe in the tears of that disgusting transmengele.
Triggered!
Oh dear. That’s not very nice.
On the final point, whatever Musk is doing with X, it will have nothing to do with any hurt feelings, as the article above says.
Perhaps of course that’s just a throwaway remark and not to be taken seriously, but either way I think it’s worth rejecting.
No-one is ever really a free speech absolutist.
And stigmatizing the word ‘cisgender’ is just funny
Yeah, I am, Benedict.
So if you’re an owner of a business, your employees should be able to publicly say whatever they want – including criticizing their boss/ the company/ business goals, etc – without being fired?
To paraphrase from pre Musk Twitter – “Its a private business, he can do what he likes.”
So you can still use the term, it just gets flagged as hateful conduct. Fair enough. It is used to denigrate those without gender dysphoria. To invalidate the opinions of those without that particular delusion.
Even getting us to use the term is a victory for the trans brigade. Identity politics always was, and always will be about power. So its not surprising when those who have had it, lose it, start bumping their gums about it.
X is a private company, and he can limit or censor whatever he wants. Before he bought the company, Twitter did the same thing. In fact Twitter was far more censorious. I don’t really like Musk, but he can do whatever his little heart desires. “Congress shall make no law . . . “
They’ve gotten away with too much for too long. A long spell of blaming and shaming is necessary.
Damn right.
Yawn. These ‘free speech’ debates are beyond tedious and always counterfeit. They invariably miss (or fudge) the truly defining point about free speech (especially here on the internet). Which is that for speech to be ‘free’ it can’t be anonymous. To speak your mind but only encumbered by a mask…is not to ‘speak freely’, is it. It’s to speak from behind the protection of a veil. Hidden. Cowering. Of utterly unreliable provenance. So it’s no more ‘free speech exercised’ than is scrawling a piece of midnight graffiti or breathing down a telephone line.
To be genuinely supportive of ‘free speech’ X – and UnHerd for that matter – would need to…ban/bar anonymous posting. Oh dear. There goes the business model for 90% of social media and comments-allowing websites, huh!
In civic terms, though, the impact would be a) far more self-policing of abusive and aggressive and ‘hate speech’ (the only tenable and effective kind), and b) we could all stop wasting our time and space having these pointless (because unwinnable) subjective arguments about what content a viable ‘free speech’ framework should and should not allow.
The true ‘absolutist’ free speech position is very very simple: all human beings should be allowed to say (write, produce, etc) anything in public that they can think of or up in the privacy of their own Human minds…provided that they encumber said ‘thing’ with a full and equally public authorial declaration. That’s the real – and only – price that needs to be paid to buy one the privilege of free speech. The rest is tyre-kicking equivocation and selective special pleading.
Jack Robertson
5/18A Ballast Point Road BIRCHGROVE NSW 2014 Australia
Intl 61-429-690-261
I truly appreciate the sentiment behind your comment but posting your real address and telephone number is simply just asking for trouble. Google doxxing and SWATting.
Been doing it for 25 years mate, world-weary eyes wide open. Yes, have had a bundle of hate mail…someone once mailed me a t**d. Two advantages I have are that a) I’m nobody – nobody gives a f**k. And b) I’m too broke to bother grifting.
We all do know, don’t we, that people get jailed/tortured/murdered every day for having the courage to stand up in the flesh-and-blood to real tyrannies, and speak freely? What, and we’re all a bit scared of being…doxxed? Having our credit card lifted?
FFS. Spine up and show some grit, y’softy-wofty Brits. Waa waaa, someone I might happen to know in real life might happen to not much like what I said online. Waaa. Waaa. Someone I’ll never know might now know my real name. Waaa. Waaa. Poor widdle budding Baby Weindeers…you lot must all be Incredibly Important Folks to have to worry about being stalked, papped, outed. cancelled, publicly shamed, sacked etc etc!
Taunt, taunt, chuckle, sh*t-eating grin, etc etc.
No, I don’t expect anyone else to do it. Yes, I do buy the right to tease some of you for cowering behind pseudonyms like sooks. Yes, it’s a useful online tactic – and a cheap one (so cheap it’s ‘free’ fnar fnar SWIDT?) – for annoying someone way smarter and cleverer at arguing than me (ie most Unherders!).
Yes, it’s contrived (and a
bitlot w*nky).But it’s deliberate, ie only to make the deeper point about ‘free speech’. We are tying ourselves in paralysed bloody knots mistaking ‘free speech’ as a noun. It ain’t. It’s a verb. It’s not a ‘thing’ that you say. It’s a thing that you do.
Want to protect the right to ‘speak freely’? Do, don’t say. Show, don’t tell. Use it. Or lose it. Chrs.
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
And you got nothing. Those of us who could suffer severe attacks – physical, emotional, professional – that put both us and our families in danger, have to be more careful. We do our bit by influencing our representatives to restrict the bad behavior of the troublemakers.
I disagree. I think it’s fine for anonymous posters to remain anonymous. It just reduces their credibility somewhat.
That’s why I post with my real name. I stand over what I write with my reputation. But someone should still be free to post anon if they wish. And someone else should be free to listen to that anon, if they so wish.
Good on you – I see you, Graham Stull. Flesh-and-blood adult, with skin in the game.
Of course it’s ‘fine’ for others to do as they please. I’m not trying to ‘tell’ anyone what to do. I’m just saying: if you post from behind a mask, you are NOT ‘speaking freely’. You’re speaking from behind a mask.
It’s not free speech. Nor is it defending free speech. The way – the ONLY way – to defend free speech…is to speak freely. Use it, or lose it.
Chrs Gra. Good on, and for, you. For joining that defence. Properly.
I simply don’t agree, and you don’t provide a logical justification for your argument. You have invented your own rather eccentric definition of free speech. Unless we are talking about AI bots etc, then all speech is coming from SOME human being, whether using their real name or not. Does it matter if I use a nickname that no one knows, except a couple of close friends? Are people making valid points, but who fear being harassed, as many people are, better advised to keep schtum? It is certainly not an “absolutist” position on free speech to demand people publish their email and physical addresses. This is just so obviously a spiffing idea if you perhaps live in China! But not only there.
I don’t know you any better because you’ve published an address – which may be entirely fictitious as far as I know – I am not about to check! And I expect were any significant number of UnHerd commentators to try to check up on you, you’d rapidly get pretty pissed off! I don’t know YOU, but I know some of your opinions. THAT is what free speech is all about. It may well be that your proposal would lead to much more polite and respectful discourse, it likely would, but that’s not the same argument.
Why don’t you pick up the phone and call me? Reverse charges – I will accept. I’ve been doing this epistemic experiment online for the best part of twenty-five odd years. I’ve been phoned quite a few times. Had letters sent. (Once, a dog t**d.) Once had someone take a picture from outside my apartment door, too, and post it online. Bit hairier! But by and large I’ve found readers are far more intimidated by me posting my details online than I am. I think possibly it’s because it demands they wonder upon what epistemic basis they are really posting opinions online. Most in joints like this, if we’re honest, are engaging in a kind of recreational ‘Discursive Intellectual Cosplay’. Bit of brainy pantomime to make us feel democratically and intellectually engaged (without necessarily actually having to be properly so). There’s nothing wrong with that, but for many – definitely those with avatars or partial names only – it’s not ‘free speech being fearlessly exercised’, is it. Not really. The Bylines here – especially those like Stock and Bindle, who have paid real world flesh-and-blood costs for it – are the ones who are ‘speaking freely’.
The litmus test is: is there a price I might pay for this? Mostly, online debates are pain and risk-free. And always so, if you remain anonymous.
Quite seriously, Andrew Fisher (I see you, onya): give me a call, reverse the charges if you prefer. I’m perfectly harmless and sane. (And very very private and shy, actually.) I will make these arguments to you voice-to-voice: that, no, it’s simply ‘convenient’ for you to argue that one doesn’t need to attach an authorial anchor for speech to be free. Yes, we do simply disagree. I do very much think that your assertion is wrong wrong wrong. That one is not speaking ‘freely’ if one is only prepared to say the things one says while hidden.
That is NOT speech spoken ‘freely’. It’s speech spoken conditionally.
PS: As an extension of your pozzy: if you say something using someone else’s identity, is that also ‘free speech’? Using your logic, it really ought be regarded as such. (It being the content, not the provenance, that counts, hmm?). Or what if I invent something out of thin air that is, not having any authorial provenance attached, is impossible (or just difficult) for the hearer to check…is THAT ‘free speech’? Not by any meaningful or useful epistemic standard I know.
But call me. Let’s chat. Freely! Chrs Andrew. 🙂
Pretending to be someone else is fraud. Pretending to be no one in particular removes the bias one might see in your name (male/female, political views, personality etc).
One of the greatest collections of thought of all time was written under the pseudonum Publius, so the real authors’ political views and personalities would not influence the readers.
The kind of person who sees bias in your name will just assume bias is driving your opinion anyway.
Look, write anonymously, fine. I can’t tell you not to. But just don’t call it ‘speaking freely’, and don’t come up with all sorts of convenient excuses. And FFS do NOT try to present it as a discursive virtue.
You opine anonymously because you’re wary/scared/want to avoid the potential yucky consequences of opining using your real name. The end. It’s not a crime mate. It’s just not exercising your right (and obligation) to ‘speak freely’, and so it’s not defending ‘free speech’.
It’s just my opinion. And of course most people on the internet hate it and disagree with it. Because most people on the internet opine anonymously. So they would say that, wouldn’t they, etc.
Chrs.
PS: Good on you for defending the right to speak freely, Andrew Fisher. I see you.
Using a real complete name can result in abuse and e en assault for some people, especially women. So anonymity is needed until that will not happen.
Sure. Of course using your real name and details etc can result in abuse and even assault. Gosh. But that’s…um, the point. True free speech costs the speaker. It might only ‘potentially’ so cost. It might never ‘actually’ so cost. And it might – it usually does – end up benefitting you (and civic debate!) far far more than it ever so costs.
But the only alternative to paying said price is…to refuse to stand up in public and speak your mind as yourself because of that (potential) cost…oh dear. You have, I am sorry to say HW, just explained-by-doing what self-censorship of free speech is. The most common and very worst kind.
Come on, re-publish that same comment above…only put your full name to it this time. It is a bit un-nerving, for sure. But it is also incredibly empowering, liberating, magnificent. And the only way to defend the right to ‘speak freely’ for all. Use it, HW. Or keep siding with the forces that would have you lose it.
C’arn, you can do it, HW. Tear off your self-imprisoning, self-shackling mask! Warmest regards, and good luck.
You say that free speech should not be anonymous. Then, as if too serve as a personal exemplification of the point, you post your personal information (nice location BTW, near the bay) and state you don’t care if people learn it because you are a nobody who has nothing to lose. Well then you are not very brave, are you? Some people have achievements or livelihoods, and in many other jurisdictions, even lives, to lose.
The problem with your argument is that if people are not free to speak from a position of anonymity then they are simply not free. Not just speech is not free, people themselves are not free. Ironically then, a people whose members are not free are the ones who need to practice free speech from the position of anonymity.
Cry harder.
Fully agree with Musk. Sex is a statistically valid predictor of gender, meaning that although some women have masculine traits and vice versa, it is very highly predictive and correlated. So people who are born with one biolgical sex and then wish to be seen / live as another gender are in fact quite rare. For sake of argument, lets say these people are around 2% of the population. A high estimate but just to make the point. To more helpfully categorise this different manifestation of sex and gender, the name ‘transgender’ has been settled on to define these people. The rest of the population does not need a name and does not need to be differentiated from the normal, expected and predicted manifestation of sex and gender. To therefore insist on giving them a name that differentiates them from transgender and that implies a specific relationship with sex and gender that needs to be called out, is designed to impose a categorisation and name on a group of people who neither need it, want it nor agree with it. For example, if i decided to call transgender people a name that i decided they should be called (i dont know something like ‘trannie’?) they would be horrendously offended. Therefore, Musk is right.
The transgender folk are .004% of the population. You can look it up like I did.
I am absolutely fine with restricting the free speech of the woke scum. It’s fun watching them squirm now that the boot is on the other foot.
I was just banned for saying “ climate cult” and “Trans” cult responding to a harsh crack at a posters “ Trump cult”. Apparently openly hating 1/2 the county is ok, but don’t dare point out the lefts cult.
The author is technically correct but this ‘Musk is just as bad’ type story is nonsense. Before Musk Twitter literally had special communication protocols with the US government to enable them to daily suppress whatever they wanted. This meant anything that helped Trump. The fact that Elon doesn’t like the trans movement (one of his kids is ‘trans’ and has disowned him) – or doesn’t like his private jet being tracked in real time is not a wholesale repudiation of his commitment to free speech.
Good for Elon Musk! ‘Cisgender’ is employed by so-called ‘progressives’ as a sexist slur to insult those whom they hate and whom they consider to be interior. It is no different in essence from other hypersensitive slurs such as the n-word. In this wonderful modern era both words are examples of hate speech.