Twitter CEO Elon Musk is facing a barrage of media criticism for acquiescing to demands from the Turkish government to censor content on the site. The acts of censorship took place last week, just days before the country’s presidential election; unsurprisingly, the restricted accounts had expressed criticism of autocratic Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.<\/p>\n

Given that Musk has promised to make Twitter a platform for free speech\u2014indeed, his stated rationale for buying the site was to make it more protective of political expression\u2014his kowtowing to Erdogan has struck many commentators as hypocritical. “Elon Musk Doesn’t Care About Free Speech,” declared<\/a>\u00a0The New Republic.\u00a0<\/em>NBA star Enes Kanter Freedom, a Turkish dissident who has frequently criticized the Erdogan regime, said<\/a> “I don’t want to hear about Elon Musk talking about free speech ever again.”<\/p>\n

Reason<\/em>‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown also chided<\/a> Musk for “making a dictator’s job easier.” And Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tweeted that treating freedom of speech “as a principle rather than a slogan” would have meant fighting back harder.<\/p>\n

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What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought to the Supreme Court of Turkey and won. This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan. https:\/\/t.co\/tHkx1Wa06r<\/a><\/p>\n

— Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) May 13, 2023<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n