After the woman behind Libs of TikTok uncovered inexplicable censorship of content on the X platform, owner Elon Musk promised to look into it.
Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik wrote in a post on Thursday that X (formerly known as Twitter) would not run ads on posts that contained words such as “Gr**m*er”, “Dr*g qu**n”, “In*0c**ce/in*0ce*t”, “Tr*ns” and even “Am*n”, but would run ads on her posts if she self-censored. Later that day, X owner Musk mentioned her by name and promised to cut that list down to size. Musk said in a video, “There’s a list, I think, Chaya Raichik was pointing out. Like, the system, you know, and I have looked at this list. And some of the terms on the list, I’m like, ‘Look, if that’s a bad word, I clearly need to look up, get Urban Dictionary or something,’ you know, because that one I didn’t realize was a bad word. So that list needs to be trimmed. That’s the, sort of, not safe for advertising list.”
HOLY SH*T! Elon name dropped me in his Twitter Space and said he saw my list of demonetized words that I reported on. Promises to fix it.
— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) September 28, 2023
“This list needs to be trimmed” - @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/Ap66TQCmMp
Immediately preceding these remarks, Musk strongly suggested that much of the current censorship that occurs on his platform is a holdover from the past Twitter regime that is being eradicated. “We do lots of dumb things, but these dumb things, you know, as the saying goes, ‘One should not attribute to malice that which easily can be explained by incompetence,’” Musk added before discussing demonetization. “We do lots of foolish things, but, and we want to fix that. And a bunch of these foolish things have been in place for a decade, you know, and I can’t fix them all at once. And we are fixing them.”
Noting that both Elon Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino have embraced the expression “freedom of speech, not of reach,” MRC Vice President Dan Schneider challenged Musk to go further, “How about instead of trimming the list of unacceptable words, you just protect all constitutionally-protected speech?”
Musk went on to say that “advertisers are, can be rather skittish,” further noting that “a loud noise in the room would scare advertisers,” but he did not back down on his statement that the “list needs to be trimmed.”
Previously, Musk has reversed the platform's bans on “deadnaming” and “misgendering,” two leftist words used to describe telling the truth about “transgender” individuals. He has also reinstated accounts such as Canadian Professor Dr. Jordan Peterson and The Babylon Bee.
Following Musk’s decision to change the platform’s rules on gender-related policies rampant censorship on X dropped.
According to MRC Free Speech America’s CensorTrack.org database, “Twitter saw a 261 percent drop in censored users and posts critiquing the left’s radical ‘transgender’ ideology in the month after the policy change (April 18 through May 17, 2023) compared with the month prior (March 18 through April 17, 2023).”
Conservatives are under attack! Contact Twitter and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable
