During the Halloween episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," Musk and Rogan discussed cancel culture while Musk claimed that X promotes “freedom of speech”.
When Rogan asked Musk why he had decided to buy Twitter, the controversial tech billionaire responded:
"This is going to sound somewhat melodramatic, but I was worried that it was having a corrosive effect on civilization... that it was having a bad impact," he said.
Musk said he believes that there is a “mind virus” spreading through an “information technology weapon” that is leading to the “end of civilization”.
Social media has spread this “virus”, he claimed, causing people to act like zombies.
“If you walk around downtown San Francisco, right near the X/Twitter headquarters, it’s a zombie apocalypse. I mean, it’s rough,” he added.
The two lamented that they have both been subjected to “cancel culture”, with Rogan explaining that the “mind virus” does not allow for any opposing views because it “doesn’t stand up to scrutiny”.
Rogan praised Musk for taking over the company.
“You did humanity an immense service, and if that didn’t happen, the narrative of this country would have gone further and further down to the point that people would have been scared to speak their mind,” he said.
“It was important to have at least one social media outlet that wasn’t cancelling people,” Musk replied.
Despite Musk being a self-described “free speech absolutist” his platform is still heavily shadow-banning users under search bans and maintains falsely implemented "NSFW" and permanent "media marked as sensitive" flags on regular news accounts.
The practice of implementing search bans and permanent "media marked as sensitive" flags for Twitter Blue-paying subscribers is that it violates user-agreements. Censorship at this level may serve as grounds for coming class-action lawsuits.
X accounts are still being cancelled, as the platform highly favors a select set of accounts that are not categorized under "bad reputation scores" set in motion by Twitter 1.0.
You can find extensive studies on the X platform's publicly published code by following subject matter expert, The Parzival.
In a recent post, The Parzival reported on Community Notes being used to weaponize against those that criticize X's current censorship practices:
On October 29, 2023, users questioned why Elon Musk has not made public the X code that reveals why the delisting and throttling of accounts is occurring. Musk claims that this will become transparent "by the end of the year."
