Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of social media platform X, has been nominated for the European Parliament’s 2024 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Each year, the European Parliament awards the Sakharov Prize to honour “exceptional individuals and organisations defending human rights and fundamental freedoms”, with nominations put forward by political groups or by at least 40 MEPs.

Musk was nominated as “the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) and founder of several companies including Neuralink and OpenAI” by Patriots for Europe (PfE) and Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN), two right-wing, Eurosceptic political groupings, which together account for 109 of the European Parliament’s 720 MEPs.

Among Europe’s progressive elites, the story was received with a sort of Cassandra-like fury — exactly the sort of outrage one would expect, the think tanks, political offices and news desks of Brussels seemed to seethe in unison, when a Parliament that claims to be on The Right Side of History won’t enforce its principle of “cordon sanitaire” (i.e. excluding right-wing parties from positions of power) with all the maniacal force and fury of a Medieval city-state battling the spread of an unusually virulent disease. 

“The EU far right wants to give Elon Musk a free speech award,” shrieked Politico. “If shortlisted, Musk will be invited to the European Parliament to defend his views on free speech,” they continued, as if Brussels stood teetering on the brink of a form of political demagoguery not witnessed in Europe since Hitler introduced the Enabling Act to the Reichstag, and, with members of the SS looking on, inquired as to what the opposition intended to do about it. 

True, that might initially sound a little over the top — but it’s through precisely this rhetorical mode of hyperbole and hysteria that woke pundits, academics and no doubt warm-hearted yet intellectually inert celebrities have viewed Musk ever since Twitter’s board accepted his bid to buy the company for $45 billion back in April 2022

At the time, for instance, comedian Kathy Griffin tweeted that Musk was a “media-thirsty, vindictive white supremacist”. Civil rights activist Shaun King deleted his account, fearing Musk’s “white power” and apparently fretful that “white nationalists” would be free to roam the internet, targeting and harassing people. (Shaun himself is white, needless to say — and, of course, now back on X). The perennially wrong Jeff Jarvis went so far as to warn that “today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany”. 

But what is it, exactly, that they object to? Musk’s willingness to allow those with even a slightly different opinion from their own to exercise freedom of expression online?

It feels a bit that way. Indeed, for all that the Politicos and the Kathy Griffins of this world would casually, unthinkingly, dismiss someone like András László — an MEP from Hungary’s Fidesz, which is part of the PfE group — as a “far right white supremacist”, there’s mounting evidence to suggest he has a point in arguing that Musk deserves the prize because: “The role of X in defending freedom of speech is unique and it is what all social media platforms should be aiming for.”

pre-Musk Twitter … had an appalling record when it came to defending free speech

Take pre-Musk Twitter, for instance. It had an appalling record when it came to defending free speech, having practically single-handedly pioneered the weaponisation of vague, il-defined terms like “mis-” and “disinformation” to justify the deletion of accounts on political grounds.

Blocking the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election, and banning former President Donald Trump from the platform, are emblematic examples of Twitter’s violations of basic tenets of free speech.

Many gender-critical feminists — and even satirical website Babylon Bee — were also censored by pre-Musk era Twitter simply for stating biological truths, or raising important questions about women-only spaces.

Following completion of his takeover, Musk announced that he intended to grant an Amnesty to all suspended/banned Twitter accounts provided they had not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam”. True to his word, the company then welcomed back a number of gender critical commentators, including women’s rights activist Kellie-Jay Keen, comedy writer Graham Linehan, journalist Meghan Murphy, barrister Dennis Kavanagh, and philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith.

Musk also allowed a number of high-profile independent journalists, including Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi to access the company’s vast archive of internal documents, with the aim of documenting how Big Tech and the US federal government colluded to silence those who challenged prevailing orthodoxy on issues like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, immigration, climate change and trans ideology.

What resulted was the “Twitter Files”. Among the many revelations they contain is that “shadowbanning”, which had previously been hypothesised but never proven, regularly took place on the platform. Twitter executives like Jack Dorsey (under oath to Congress in 2018) and Vijaya Gadde long denied that the company censored users, and said all they did was remove Tweets that were illegal, threatening or racially abusive.

Thanks to Musk’s willingness to open up the archives, however, we now know definitively that the company deployed a vast array of “visibility filtering” devices to suppress opinions which C-suite executives — and the federal officials pulling their strings — regarded as ideologically inconvenient.

More recently, Musk was part of the backlash against Ireland’s illiberal Hate Speech Bill, which he said placed Irish people at “the mercy” of politicians and bureaucrats who would define speech they don’t like as hate speech — and pledged to fund Irish legal challenges to the legislation. 

In fact, Musk has long proved willing to use his wealth to do practical good of this kind. Last year, the richest man in the world (net worth: US$243 billion) began funding legal bills for any users of X that are “treated unfairly” by employers due to their activity on the platform, and suggested that in such cases he “will go after the boards of directors of the companies too”.

Earlier this year, Musk declared that “freedom of speech is worth fighting for” after Australia’s cyber safety regulator, eSafety, dropped its federal court case over X’s refusal to block footage of a radicalised teenager stabbing a bishop at a Church in Sydney not just for Australians, but for users of the platform worldwide.

The case was portrayed as a battle for control of the internet, and went to the heart of a central and as yet unresolved issue in an increasingly online world, namely, whether government-led attempts to control the distribution within a country of what it regards as “harmful” online material should be allowed to impinge on the rights of those beyond its borders to access that same material.

In this context, eSafety’s decision to drop the case was at least partial vindication for Musk, who had protested that the regulator’s actions risked allowing one nation to control “the entire internet”.

Back in July, Musk accused the European Union (EU) of offering him a “secret deal” to “quietly censor” users of his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and thereby avoid millions of pounds worth of fines.

He made the extraordinary claim after the European Commission — the EU’s executive body — said that X was “in breach” of the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force last year, establishing a regulatory framework that critics have likened to an “incoherent, multilevel censorship regime” that will have a “chilling effect on free speech” and will ultimately cause “the death of free speech online”.

“The other platforms accepted [the secret] deal. X did not,” he said, adding: “We look forward to a very public battle in court so that the people of Europe can know the truth.”

During X’s ongoing legal battle with Brazil’s unelected Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the company has repeatedly refused to comply with court orders, many of which were sealed, demanding that the company ban over 140 accounts, among them some of Brazil’s most prominent right-wing pundits and even elected members of Congress, for spreading what he claimed was “fake news” and “misinformation”.

(De Moraes has form in this regard, by the way — as revealed by the Twitter Files, in 2022 he illegally demanded that the company reveal private information about Twitter users who used hashtags he considered “inappropriate”, while also censoring, on his own initiative and without any respect for due process, posts on Twitter by parliamentarians from the Brazilian Congress).

Responding to de Moraes’s dictatorial demands on X, Musk declared: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy, and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” 

As if to prove the point, de Moraes retaliated by ordering X to be blocked within the country, affecting an estimated 22 million Brazilian users — an unprecedented move for a democratic country, but one that various authoritarian nations, including China, Iran, Russia and North Korea, have long become familiar with.

Now in full-on totalitarian mode, de Moraes went on to decree that Brazilians who used virtual private networks (VPNs) in an attempt to get around the ban would face daily fines of 50,000 reais (€8,050) — a strategy which, again, is typically associated with authoritarian regimes. (Tellingly, however, despite the threats, VPN demand has skyrocketed in the country “by as much as 1,600%.”)

For good measure, he then seized around $3.3 million (€2.9 million) from bank accounts belonging to X, as well as Musk’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink, in a move that the Brazilian jurist Lênio Streck and others have since criticised, pointing out that the fact both companies belong to the same economic group does not justify seizing Starlink’s funds for fines levied against X.

Having held out for over five months, X recently informed Brazil’s Supreme Court that it will comply with orders to stop the spread of misinformation, and has since asked for its nationwide ban to be lifted.

… widespread attention has been drawn to the fact that the global elites’ war on online free speech is slowly but surely intensifying

A setback, undoubtedly. But as the French MEP — or rather, of course, “far right white supremacist” — Thierry Mariani points out in a video posted to X, explaining his decision to propose Musk as the PfE’s nominee for the Sakharov Prize: “In the 21st century, freedom of mind and freedom of opinion is still relevant, even here in the European Union. Today, we’re in a century where censorship is reappearing on many points. We live in a century where totalitarian ideologies like Wokeism and Islamism try to silence this freedom of opinion.”

All of which serves as a reminder that it is thanks to Elon Musk’s determination to fight — sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully — for the speech rights of people all across the globe who dare to dissent from prevailing orthodoxy, that widespread attention has been drawn to the fact that the global elites’ war on online free speech is slowly but surely intensifying.