Is money more valuable than freedom of expression?

Twitter has restricted access to some tweets in the country at the request of the government ahead of the presidential elections in Turkey. This silenced pages critical of the government, according to Business Insider. Musk was later criticized for once again abandoning the “principles of freedom of expression”. The billionaire commented on the situation with his usual unbridled demeanor.

Twitter account responsible for global government relations, published a statementTwitter says it is taking steps to restrict access to certain content in Turkey “in response to the lawsuit”. Restricted page owners have been notified and their posts will remain accessible to the rest of the world.

This thread was quoted by Bloomberg reporter Matthew Iglesias. He wrote: “The Turkish government asked Twitter to censor its rivals just before the election, and Elon Musk complied – it’s worth creating some interesting reports in the form of the Twitter Files”.

Musk decided to respond personally and echoed what was previously stated on Twitter Global Government Affairs:

“Are you out of your mind, Iglesias? Before Twitter, the election was completely blocked [у Туреччині] or restrict access to certain tweets. What do you want?”

Deep troubles, alarm bells

Twitter users are worried about the situation. In the past, when the company wasn’t owned by Moscow, the company didn’t respond very well to government requests to remove or block content, although it did happen. For example, in 2021, at the request of Roskomnadzor, 1.9 thousand items were deleted in just one month. Prior to this, the firm resisted for a long time.

After meeting Turkey’s demands, some users suggested: Authoritarian governments might take such a backlash as a signal that Twitter will help them silence their opponents when they threaten to regionally ban the platform..

Others believe Twitter could be more transparent about Turkey’s request. It’s unclear exactly what they mean because the company didn’t hide the fact that it was resorting to censorship. Additionally, Musk himself Twitter promised to publish the message it received from Turkeybut at the time of writing this has not happened yet.

critics

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, is among those who openly criticize Musk. He wrote that the company could protect freedom of expression in Turkey, as Wikipedia did after Turkey banned the encyclopedia from 2017 to 2020. Then, instead of bowing to the Turkish government’s request to remove the state-sponsored terrorism-related article, Wikipedia fought Turkey in the country’s highest court until the ban was lifted.

If Elon now says, “We don’t care about free speech if it gets in the way of making money,” he should say so.
– Wales said.

Vanity Fair reported that investigative journalist Cevheri Güven, who was censored by Twitter, said the following in an interview with the Turkish newspaper Minute: Twitter’s surrender to Tayyip Erdogan is a shame on behalf of democracy and freedom of expression.”

Musk and Erdogan

In 2017, Elon Musk met with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who after 20 years is vying for a new term as president. Then they signed an agreement between Türkiye and SpaceX. Another of their meetings took place a year later. Additionally, SpaceX helped Turkey launch its own satellite last month, Insider reported.

Therefore, critics believe that Musk’s ties to Erdogan may be why Twitter accepted the takedown request so easily.“He aimed to silence his opponents of Erdogan on the eve of his re-election as President of Turkey.”