Elon Musk has extended an offer to financially support the legal expenses of individuals who are users of his social network, X, facing maltreatment or discrimination from their employers due to their activities on the platform.
The move is understood to have come from his pledge to make Twitter a reliable source of information, where people are allowed to express themselves without being censored.
Since Musk acquired Twitter, now X, last October, he has brought in a lot of controversial changes, pitting him against users and advertisers. Among the newly-introduced changes is freedom of expression beyond what was obtainable under former Twitter leadership, when users’ opinions about a series of issues were highly censored.
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The world’s richest man reinstated accounts such as former US President Donald Trump, retired kickboxer champion Andrew Tate, and some others who were permanently blocked on Twitter over their tweets.
Musk had been critical of the level of censorship on Twitter, which he attributed to wokeness. The entrepreneur has accused the Left of forcing social media platforms to censor contents that they do not like. Now he is taking further steps (after reviewing policies that enabled the censorship) to protect the platform’s users.
“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill,” Musk said on Sunday, adding that there is “no limit” and urging users found in that situation to “please let us know.” He said that X Corp. will “go after the boards of directors of the companies too.”
If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill.
No limit.
Please let us know.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2023
The move is coming against the backdrop of ad revenue decline on the platform, following the mass exodus of advertisers on X due to disagreement with Musk’s changes to content moderation.
More than 90 percent of X’s revenue came from advertisers but has dropped by more than half since Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the platform.
Last week, X filed a suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit group that has criticized the company’s handling of hate speech.
The legal complaint, lodged on Monday in the federal court of San Francisco, alleges that CCDH intentionally sought to diminish advertiser interest in X, the social network, by releasing critical reports regarding the platform’s handling of offensive content.
The lawsuit specifically asserts that CCDH violated both Twitter’s terms of service and federal laws related to hacking. This was done through data scraping from Twitter’s platform and by enlisting an unnamed individual to inappropriately gather information concerning Twitter, which had been provided to a third-party brand monitoring entity.
The filing further contends that CCDH made an extensive effort to stifle users on Twitter’s platform by drawing attention to the viewpoints they express on social media.
It is not clear what impact the lawsuit will have on the already dented relationship between advertisers and X, which Musk hired the self-styled “free speech absolutist” former NBCUniversal ad executive Linda Yaccarino as CEO in May to help repair.
But Musk also has been known for his limited tolerance of criticism. Former personnel from his other ventures, SpaceX and Tesla Inc., have alleged that they were dismissed as a reprisal for expressing critical opinions about him as the CEO of both enterprises.
CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed told CNN that Musk opened Twitter up, following his takeover, to hate speech – making the lawsuit “sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory to me.”
“The truth is that he’s [Elon Musk] been casting around for a reason to blame us for his own failings as a CEO,” Ahmed said, “because we all know that when he took over, he put up the bat signal to racists and misogynists, to homophobes, to antisemites, saying ‘Twitter is now a free-speech platform.’ … And now he’s surprised when people are able to quantify that there has been a resulting increase in hate and disinformation.”