Is Elon Musk Throttling Free Speech On X After Promising to Protect It?

Substack vs X: Which is better?

X and Substack have been bastions of free speech in a world of censorship, but has one of the world’s largest social media platforms sold out and is now throttling free speech?

There are Rumors and There Is Truth

Let’s start with the truth. People have been reporting that X deletes posts that link to Substack. Here’s one user showing it happening in real time. Odd since Sub Stack’s frequent poster and journalist, Matt Taibbi, who helped expose the original Twitter that Musk purchased, has also completely shunned Twitter or X and moved to post on Substack. Taibbi, a self-proclaimed free speech advocate, might have been used by Musk. He certainly insinuates as much.

Taibbi supposedly left Twitter after the site started throttling the social media postings that linked to Substack. After Musk gave Taibbi freedom to expose the former Twitter owners and their government collusion in the Twitter Files, Taibbi expressed in a tweet that he was alarmed and asked what was going on when he couldn’t link out to articles he had written on Substack expressing his views under freedom of speech and the First Amendment to our Constitution. Musk says that Taibbi’s claims are false, and counter-tweeted that Substack links were never blocked.

Many more users are being canceled, or given a low “Grok score,” akin to the Communist Chinese social credit score. But this one tracks your “positivity" moreso than your politics.

ADL has also come for Substack. An example is canceling a Christian minister as he explained his stance against trans ideology, part of the UN and WEF’s Great Reset agenda. Odd then that X is doing the same thing.

More facts. . .

The man who once said, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” (“The voice of the people is the voice of God.”) is now selling the AI portion of his platform to BlackRock for $6 billion, and immediately changing the algorithm to seemingly squash free speech days later. It’s also highly suspect since BlackRock is linked to Trump’s assassination attempts and one of the largest military industrial contractors that reap trillions in profits off our endless wars in Ukraine, Iraq, Iran, Gaza, etc.

Musk says he will limit the reach of users who post “negative” comments with his new algorithm. The algorithm punishes dissent, including those who speak out against their government and corruption. Taibbi accuses Musk of going back to the old Twitter, but worse.

It certainly doesn’t look good.

But there are threats to freedom of speech everywhere. On the Substack blogging platform, independent journalists and editorialists depend on user subscriptions, but they’ve added “notes” that are similar to X’s, and articles won’t show up on X with an image preview. X also deeply limits the reach of Substack posts that have an external link, in some cases even worse than the shadow-banning and other tactics practiced by Zuckerberg on Facebook and Meta. Joe Rogan exposed that Zuckerberg demotes posts on Facebook based on his agenda, and Zuckerberg even admitted to being coerced by Biden to do his bidding during Covid. Is Elon now doing the same thing as Zuckerberg?

Substack writers report that sharing a post with a Substack link on X can receive as much as an 80 to 90 percent reduction in engagement compared to if you share something without an external image, link, or video. One could argue that Musk is trying to keep users on X instead of sending them to other platforms that would compete for attention, but it’s still an egregious hit to First Amendment rights which he swore to protect.

Is It Time for Everyone to Flee X?

It’s not certain if Musk has betrayed us all just yet, but it might be time to start looking for alternative media sources again since Musk is edging toward being an Orwellian dictator telling people what they can and can’t say on X. If he owns it, he can do what he wants with it, but whatever happened to Freedom of Speech? And why did he sell out to BlackRock? It definitely smells fishy.

With AI taking over and Musk’s other company Neuralink in full swing, which is pushing an AI-brain interface, it's dangerous to see where this could potentially lead and irresponsible not to consider the potential that Musk was playing us all. It kind of smacks of bio-digital governance. First, they tell you what you can post, and then they rule over what you can even think.