# Elon's Free Speech By [bbird.eth](https://paragraph.com/@bbird) · 2022-04-28 --- One of my first triggering twitter events happened the other day when I came across this tweet by Elon Musk talking about his position. I mean getting triggered by the doge king is nothing new and I’m usual the one partially defending his antics. But this particular tweet about the need for free speech really got under my skin. Not because it was it was antagonistic, or I felt it was wrong but mainly because it was so poorly thought out (although my reply wasn’t much better…). I have 3 main issues with the which all centre around the concept of freedom. Firstly, is reframing of free speech to be that which matches the law. To make such a sweeping? statement is open to such broad interpretation is to be useless. Is this particular state law, Or more broadly constitutional law? Or is he referring to some sort of moral law which we share. Ultimately this raises the issues of US hegemonic view that constantly permits these arguments. I’m certain that the Elon’s free speech in the US would go down very different in areas of Europe or Asia. Free Speech is not culturally agnostic such that its potential harm is separated from the context it is in. This brings me to my second issue, the reference to censorship that goes beyond the law. By pegging his non definition to law it raises a significant question around the censorship he would then support. Take the context of the US for example, which I presume is the law he his referring too. The patriotic act passed in 2001 by the US senate is legal act which allows the US and its institution to have oversight on business records and conducting roving wiretaps to name but a few provisions. Theses powers were used to target suspected terrorists and limit any further attacks by gaining further intelligence. While the patriot act has been modified over the years with a rolling back of the some of its powers, it had been extended, with some powers such as section 215, enabling domestic call record and business document collection, until 2020, when Trump vetoed the bill containing its further extension. (Glossed over a lot but HERE is a brief article on it for more context). Under Elon's above definition, censorship and surveillance of individuals who have met the criteria deemed appropriate and legitimate as they may pose a threat to national security. This legal basis for surveillance, blurs the lines between security and censorship by leaving a broad definition of terrorist of internet connected crime on the table, one which some of Mr. Musk’s tweets could be argued to breach. Finally, a more normative and thought experimentie issue I found with this position, is his reference to the will of the people being the basis for Law in a country. While this makes intuitive sense and should be the case in any democracy, the reality, I think, is a lot murkier. I’m heavily on the idea of positive and negative freedom by Isaiah Berlin and Others which I haven’t read since college so wish me luck. Broadly, speaking an individual can be said to have negative liberty is the absence of obstacles or constraints faced by and individual. On the other hand, positive liberty relates to the ability to the potential to act and release one’s potential in some way. The problem I see with Elons argument is that he assumes that free speech, and the will of the people as an extension of this, need only require negative freedom and not positive freedom. I would argue that within the current democratic system a large number of the polis suffer from a lack of positive freedom due to the role of capital within participation of the political process, through many facets of its institutions. In this way, the will of the people as codifying law and being the source of truth so to speak is very suspect in the current context of the USA. While I may have been annoyed by this tweet and have presented some very poorly formed arguments against it, I do think free speech and beyond this, privacy, to be very pressing and difficult subjects. I think the important thing that my arguments above may argue, is that context is everything in these discussions. We must take the words and definitions, such as free speech and law discussed above, within the context they are placed. A priest and pauper may utter the same words but our reaction to such preaching is very different depending on whether it is an alter on Sunday morning or an alley on a Saturday night. --- *Originally published on [bbird.eth](https://paragraph.com/@bbird/elon-s-free-speech)*