Elon Musk took aim at ‘aggressive censorship’ - and immediately got called out

Elon Musk is once again facing online ridicule after sharing another post about free speech and censorship – namely that Adolf Hitler carried out “aggressive censorship” when he first came to power – while also being a social media boss who has shut down Twitter/X accounts he doesn’t like and placed restrictions on certain words on the platform.

Musk made the comment in response to a post from US vice president JD Vance, who shared a clip from CBS News’ Face the Nation.

In the video, Margaret Brennan interviewed Secretary of State Marco Rubio and said “free speech was weaponised to conduct a genocide” with respect to the Nazis and the Second World War.

Vance branded the exchange “crazy” and added: “Does the media really think the holocaust was caused by free speech?”

The Twitter/X owner replied: “One of the first things Hitler did upon gaining power was apply aggressive censorship.”

Except other social media users were quick to point out Musk’s own contradictions when it comes to free speech and censorship - and they only needed to comment one word in order to do so.

This relates to a decision taken by Musk in June 2023, when he announced that the words ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’ – both pertaining to someone whose gender identity is the same as the sex they were assigned at birth – are “considered slurs” on Twitter/X:

And just hours later, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” fumed that CBS News’ 60 Minutes programme are “the biggest liars in the world” and “engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election”, meaning that they “deserve a long prison sentence” – which sounds an awful lot like censorship:

Musk has faced several accusations of antisemitism in recent years, after claiming in late 2023 that another user who claimed Jewish communities have a “dialectical hatred” of white people had “said the actual truth”.

He later apologised for the "foolish" tweet.

More recently, on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Musk was accused of giving a “Nazi salute” on stage, which he rejects, and which received international condemnation.

“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” he wrote in response to the controversy.

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