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Autumn Johnson
Autumn is a practicing attorney licensed in the Commonwealth of Virginia and the District of Columbia. When not working, Autumn enjoys reading, writing, playing video games, and spending time with her cats.
Twitter owner Elon Musk has been tweeting about a topic that many times gets conservatives censored on the platform. He voiced support for a new Florida law banning sex change surgery for minors.
“Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life,” he tweeted Friday. Twitter rightfully did not censor the tweet, which was viewed nearly 22 million times, despite the platform’s rampant censorship of other users who criticize the left’s radical “transgender” ideology.
“It’s good to see Twitter did not censor Musk for his tweet critical of the radical left’s ‘transgender’ ideology,” said MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris. “Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for many conservatives who continue to speak out against leftist, science deniers on the platform.”
Indeed, Twitter allowed Musk to publicly support a new Florida law banning hormone blockers and “gender reassignment surgery,” but the platform censored Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for expressing similar sentiments. Just last month, Twitter reduced the visibility of a video from the governor’s State of the State speech, according to a screenshot from Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik.
“Children are not guinea pigs for science experiments, and we cannot allow people to make money off mutilating them,” he tweeted. DeSantis was describing the story of self-described “former trans kid” Chloe Cole, who was forced to take puberty blockers at age 13 and attended his speech.
Musk originally promised to make the platform a beacon of free speech, but it appears that leftist Twitter employees are still undermining his free speech agenda.
In March, an MRC Free Speech America study found that the majority (sixty-two per cent) of documented cases of Twitter censorship under Musk’s leadership in CensorTrack.org’s database between Nov. 14, 2022, and March 4, 2023, were tweets critical of the transgender movement.
Ironically Musk launched his $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter precisely after the platform banned satire site The Babylon Bee on March 20, 2022, for a humorous tweet declaring transgender Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year” in 2022. It’s clear that the censorship of viewpoints that slam against the left’s obsession with gender dysphoria hasn’t abated under Musk.
What’s disappointing is that critics of the transgender movement aren’t the only ones Twitter is censoring. MRC Free Speech America research illustrates how the “de facto public town square” vision that Musk promoted for Twitter has not yet come to pass.
Twitter censored DeSantis just last month when he live-streamed his response to critics who opposed the expansion of the Parental Rights in Education Act. The proposed expansion included a ban on teaching sexual orientation or gender identity from pre-k through eighth-grade classrooms. The platform placed a sensitive warning label on the live stream and users attempting to watch the video had to click past a sensitive content filter to view it.
The overall severity of the censorship since Musk took over has been demonstrably worse, according to the MRC Free Speech America study:
“In 245 of the 293 (84%) documented cases of censorship on CensorTrack.org, Twitter locked users’ accounts, and in nearly all cases users were required to delete the content to regain access to their accounts. Under the old Twitter regime, by contrast, only 136 of the 226 (60%) documented cases of censorship consisted of locked accounts.”
The Babylon Bee is a member of the Free Speech Alliance headed up by the Media Research Center.
