Despite Elon Musk’s promises, Twitter is still censoring people.

Shellenberger: Why The Media Is Attacking Free Speech Authored by Michael Shellenberger via ‘Public’ substack, Governments around the world are cracking down on free speech. What they are demanding includes the ability to read private encrypted text messages and invade homes in search of wrongspeech. Their demands thus go far beyond what the Censorship Industrial Complex was able to get away with over the last six years. And things are getting worse. Last week, the European Union announced it would punish Twitter for withdrawing from its supposedly “voluntary” censorship laws. “Twitter leaves EU voluntary code of practice against disinformation,” said the EU’s top censor, Thierry Breton, “You can run, but you can’t hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation under [the Digital Services Act] DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement.” Politico begs to differ. The Censorship Industrial Complex, it wrote last week, is an “unproven conspiracy theory that a group of left-leaning academics, think tanks, tech workers and government employees coordinated to silence right-wing voters ahead of nationwide votes. To be clear (looking at you, Twitter Files), none of this has been proved, and there’s evidence that right-leaning voices have a larger, not smaller, presence online compared with those on the left.” But it’s not unproven. In fact, the existence, funding, and actions of the Censorship Industrial Complex are extremely well-documented at this point. Across thousands of pages of Attorneys’ General lawsuits, thousands of pages of Congressional reports and testimony, and hundreds of pages of Twitter and Facebook files themselves, it’s clear that here was a highly coordinated campaign by top White House officials, government agencies, and government-funded contractors to demand Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies censor, in their own words, “often-true” content, including about drug side effects, both to prevent the public from seeing it but also to spread misinformation on behalf of