She also quotes Jason Goldman, a founding team member at Twitter who was on the company’s board before joining the Obama administration, about free speech being an “obsession of the mostly white, male members of the tech elite,” who made their fortunes before Silicon Valley became so diverse. “Contrarianism, whether it’s embodied by Elon Musk or Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders or Joe Rogan, becomes this ideology in itself.” If the left says, ‘I can’t do XYZ,’ that makes a lot of people want to do it more,” says Peter Hamby, host of Good Luck America on Snap and writer at Puck News. “Contrarianism is a big part of this free speech thing. In Silicon Valley, bucking the liberal conventions about harmful speech can seem like the maverick move. In a culture that places a premium on achieving the impossible, some tech titans may also see the liberal consensus on acceptable speech as yet another boundary to break. “This nuance seems to be lost on some techno-wizards who see any restriction as the enemy of innovation.”Īlter also speculates whether Musk’s attempt to protect free speech doesn’t just come down to contrarianism: “The right to say what you want without being imprisoned is not the same as the right to broadcast disinformation to millions of people on a corporate platform,” the Time columnist adds. She then makes the case that “‘free speech’ in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th, when the Founders enshrined it in the Constitution.” “It does seem to be a dominant obsession with the most elite, the most driven Elon Musks of the world,” says Fred Turner, professor of communication at Stanford University and author of several books about Silicon Valley culture, who argues that “free speech seems to be much more of an obsession among men.” Turner says the drive to harness and define the culture around online speech is related to “the entrepreneurial push: I did it in business, I did it in space, and now I’m going to do it in the world.” Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a major speech at Georgetown in 2019 about the importance of “free expression” and has consistently relied on the theme when explaining why Facebook has struggled to curb disinformation on the platform. The issue has anchored nearly every digital media debate for the last two years, from the dustup over Joe Rogan at Spotify to vaccine misinformation on Facebook. “Freedom of speech” has become a paramount concern of the techno-moral universe. “Why does Musk care so much about this? Why would a guy who has pushed the boundaries of electric-vehicle manufacturing and plumbed the limits of commercial space flight care about who can say what on Twitter?” Alter asks.
This, of course, ignores the reality that Musk’s recent moves are an outlier most of Silicon Valley has observably been in line with Alter’s desire to forcefully censor speech that runs contrary to social-justice dogma.
In the Left’s religion of social justice, every pillar of western civilization can be torn down by simply deconstructing it as the arbitrary ruminations of dead white men.Ĭharlotte Alter, columnist for Time magazine, recently penned a piece in which she claims freedom of speech is no more than a white man’s “obsession.”įraming her perspective through Tesla founder Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, she titles her article “Elon Musk and the Tech Bro Obsession With ‘Free Speech.’”įrom the get-go, Alter’s framing of the “Tech Bro” is a curious one, creating a narrative of Musk as the culmination of a despicable group of Tech elites who are pushing free speech at the expense of truth.