Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro asked Elon Musk if he can assure X users that his social media company will stand up for free speech if outside entities put pressure on it to censor posts.
Shapiro asked the question during a Daily Wire-hosted interview with Musk on his platform X Thursday that focused on free speech, demonetization, and anti-Semitism. During the interview that more than 250,000 people tuned into, the Daily Wire host brought up the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), two leftist groups pushing for censorship on social media. Shapiro asked Musk how he could assure X users that the social media company will stand firm when pressured to censor speech.
“You have a combination of both private organizations … calling for censorship and governments that are putting pressure on social media platforms in order to do the work that they really are not legally allowed to do, certainly in the United States,” Shapiro said. “And so how can you stand up and what sort of pledges can you make to users of Twitter with regard to these sort of backdoor pressure attempts?”
Musk responded by saying his social media platform will defend free speech to the furthest extent the law allows and added that most of the pressure he sees comes from the Left.
“Our policy is to resist any attempts at censorship to the maximum degree allowed by law. In the U.S. by far the biggest pressure comes from essentially … far-Left activist groups,” Musk said, a view that was echoed by prominent liberal constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
“What they’re trying to do there is really impose often extremely far-Left values on X and other platforms under the guise of hate speech, but it is in fact a matter of politics or of real views that I think the general public would consider to be somewhere between Left and far-Left.”
“I mean it’s really disturbing, frankly,” Musk added. “And they’ve attacked you. You’ve been the target many times,” Musk told the Daily Wire host.
After taking over the social media platform last year, Musk allowed independent journalists to report on how the federal government through the FBI and the White House pressured Twitter to censor posts and ban users who questioned the mainstream narrative on issues such as COVID and the 2020 election. The “Twitter Files” also showed that the FBI paid Twitter more than $3.4 million and influenced executives to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election.
The X space with Shapiro and Musk, along with a group of prominent Left- and Right-leaning Jewish voices, came on the back of the leftist Anti-Defamatin League (ADL) claiming that Musk’s social media platform is failing to stop anti-Semitism from spreading. Musk countered by threatening the ADL with a defamation lawsuit, blaming the self-identified “human rights organization” for lost revenue.
Shapiro defended the X owner, saying “he’s right” about the ADL’s “really ugly” tactics of trying to get advertisers to remove their revenue from the platform, comparing their chilling effect on free speech and journalism to that of GARM, the “Global Alliance for Responsible Media.”
The Daily Wire host said the ADL “proclaims that it is speaking in the name of Jewish causes. That is untrue. It is just a progressive interest group” that has “made excuses for some of the world’s worst anti-Semites in Congress so long as they are Democrats.”
Musk said the attacks from the ADL against his platform could “potentially” destroy “half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion.”
“To clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League … oh the irony!” Musk posted.
Following the interview between Shapiro and Musk, the X owner was joined by Jewish leaders, including Chair of the Advisory Board of the Combat Antisemitism Movement Natan Sharansky, Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action Agenda for the Simon Wiesenthal Center Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Chairman of the European Jewish Association Rabbi Menachem Margolin, former President of Israel Rubi Rivlin, and Rabbi Manis Friedman, “the most popular rabbi on YouTube.”