Tech mogul Elon Musk has accused the US Democratic Party of trying to stifle free speech in the country while it claims to combat hate speech and misinformation.
The billionaire made the claim following Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate between Democratic candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, where they discussed a number of issues, including free speech and censorship.
Walz stated during the debate that he does not believe that hate speech, threatening language or misinformation is protected under the First Amendment, which grants US citizens the right to free speech.
“You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, that’s the Supreme Court test,” Walz said, referring to a 1919 quote from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Writing on X on Wednesday, Musk, a self-described free speech absolutist, warned that “the Democratic Party openly wants to take your freedom of speech under the guise of what THEY deem to be ‘hate.’”
During the debate, Vance argued that censorship, which was being carried out by Big Tech companies and supported by Kamala Harris and US President Joe Biden, was a “much bigger threat to democracy than anything we’ve seen in the last four years,” including the January 6 Capitol Hill riots, which the Democratic Party has repeatedly cited as proof of the threat to democracy posed by Trump.
“We do have a threat to democracy […] It’s big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens, and it’s Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she’d like to censor people who engage in misinformation,” Vance said.
The Republican VP hopeful also accused the Biden-Harris administration of trying to get Americans banned from platforms like Facebook for criticizing government mask mandates for toddlers amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
“That’s not yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, that is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American,” Vance argued.
Back in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden administration had pressured Facebook to “censor” some Covid-19 content, and that the FBI had ordered the platform to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election.