Musk bought Twitter, which broke the social media cartel

Responding to: DAN GAINOR: We got Twitter/X as a platform 20 years ago and global censors still hate and fear it — Dan Gainor · 2026-07-11

What the Piece Argues

Dan Gainor’s Fox News column celebrates Twitter/X’s 20th anniversary as a victory against “global censors” — governments, “lefty journalists,” and the Biden-era platforms that allegedly coordinated during the previous administration to suppress conservative speech. Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter and Trump’s 2024 reelection, on this telling, broke the “social media cartel” that ran that suppression. The column then pivots to Europe — particularly the UK and EU — as the next front in the free-speech fight, warning that Democrats, if they regain power, will align with European regulators to shut down American free speech. The column treats content moderation of any kind as functionally equivalent to state censorship and frames Musk’s X as the unrestrained free-speech alternative.

Receipts

The piece performs the false-dichotomy move: it presents Musk’s X (freedom) and European-style regulation (censorship) as the only two options in the global speech landscape, when platform accountability sits at the other end of the spectrum and Musk himself personally moderates X.

• The framing wants you to believe:

  • “Musk bought Twitter, which broke the social media cartel, and Trump was reelected” — Musk and Trump defeated coordinated pro-censorship forces.
  • European regulators (UK Ofcom, EU Online Safety Act) are the active threat to American free speech.
  • Content moderation on private platforms is “censorship” and Musk’s X is the free-speech alternative.

• What’s really going on:

  • Musk’s X is itself a content-moderation regime executing Musk’s personal preferences — documented suspensions of journalists (December 2022–January 2023 for linking to the @ElonJet tracker, The Verge, December 2022), reinstatements of accounts Musk personally approved, throttling of links to outlets over editorial disputes, and direct personal intervention in the September 2024 Brazilian Supreme Court dispute and the 2025 German federal election amplification of AfD-aligned content.
  • The “censorship cartel” the piece attacks was, on the documented record, mostly private platform moderation decisions that preceded and postdated both Biden and Trump; the Biden administration’s engagement with platforms was a continuation of counter-disinformation work Trump-era officials had previously undertaken; the Hunter Biden laptop story was held by Twitter’s own pre-publication review of unverifiable material, not by Biden directive.
  • Fox News paid $787.5 million to Dominion in 2023 to settle a defamation suit over claims the network’s own hosts and executives knew were false; the documented problem with American media is accuracy, not censorship.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: For the persuadable relative, the coworker who shared the link in good faith, the cousin who reads the headline and stops there.

When journalists in Ankara see corruption stories removed within hours of publication, that was censorship. When a São Paulo reporter’s coverage of a coup plot was deleted by an X employee in San Francisco, that was a different kind of censorship — and not the kind a Fox News column has any standing to defend. The piece celebrates Musk’s X as the unrestrained free-speech alternative, but Musk himself reinstated accounts he liked and suspended journalists he didn’t, in the same calendar week. The column’s claim that “Musk bought Twitter, which broke the social media cartel” assumes readers won’t notice that the new cartel has a single owner with a personal political agenda. The Biden administration’s engagement with platforms was a counter-disinformation effort any administration facing documented foreign election interference would have undertaken — and the Trump administration had been doing the same with a different cast of platforms for years. The genuine content-moderation problems on U.S. platforms are real; the cure is platform accountability and democratic regulation, not the unilateral decisions of one billionaire. We can defend journalists in Ankara and journalists in São Paulo without pretending Musk is the answer to either.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: For the Substack-length engagement with a reader who wants receipts and an iron spine. Hold the moral high ground; name the structural beneficiary; refuse the false binary.

In September 2024, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered Musk to appoint a legal representative in Brazil or face consequences for operating there in defiance of court orders. Musk defied the order. Musk’s X suspended the accounts of Brazilian officials. Musk behaved toward Brazil exactly the way authoritarian foreign powers behave toward democracies. The piece’s binary — Musk’s X (freedom) vs. European regulation (censorship) — has no place for this fact, because the binary is built to hide it. The cui bono trace is the operation the column actually performs: Musk benefits because being framed as the anti-censor immunizes his personal moderation from scrutiny; the Republican coalition benefits because “platform moderation = censorship” reframes electoral politics around the censorship frame rather than around policy merits; Fox News benefits because the binary positions its own journalism as the freedom side. The Hunter Biden laptop story the column invokes was restricted by Twitter’s own pre-publication review of unverifiable material — a process Twitter ran across many stories of both political directions — not by Biden administration directive. The $787.5 million Dominion settlement Fox News paid in 2023 documented, in court records, that the problem with American media is accuracy rather than censorship. The freedom the column defends is the freedom of the loudest voice; the speech the column celebrates is speech already amplified by the world’s wealthiest man. That is not a free-speech position. It is a free-megaphone position, and the difference matters when smaller voices are systematically drowned.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: For the Twitter/X reply, the family-group-chat interlocutor who has just pasted the link, the reader who already doesn’t believe it but needs the rhetorical equipment to handle the second-hand version.

Imagine, if you will, the world’s richest man sitting at his desk at 1 a.m. deciding which foreign heads of state get verified and which journalists get suspended. That is the architecture of “free speech” the column celebrates. The “cartel” it claims Musk’s purchase broke is now a single gentleman with a personal political agenda and a feuding algorithm — except it isn’t really an algorithm, it’s the man himself. The column wants us to believe that European regulators are the threat to American free speech while Musk’s X, between December 2022 and January 2023, suspended a wave of journalists for linking to the @ElonJet account that tracked his flights; reinstated accounts Musk personally approved; throttled links to The New York Times over editorial disputes; and intervened personally in Brazilian Supreme Court disputes about speech regulation. The column calls this “free speech” because the alternative — Elon Musk being held to democratic standards, or being told what to do by anyone whose name isn’t Elon Musk — is apparently the censorship. The farmers and the cooks and the sports fans the column invokes as the beneficiaries of social-media freedom were always going to be on these platforms; what Musk’s purchase changed is whose thumb is on the scale. The thumb that was there before was an algorithmic thumb. The thumb that is there now is Elon Musk’s thumb. And Elon Musk’s thumb, on the documentary record, has a very specific shape: it looks like Donald Trump’s thumb, with a Tesla logo superimposed.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: For the bad-faith actor who knows better and is repeating the talking point for tribal benefit, the high-tension forum argument, the Substack thread where engagement requires the heavy artillery.

Picture the world’s richest man — having purchased the world’s most consequential conversation platform and installed himself as its editor-in-chief — complaining in a Fox News column about European regulators who would dare to tell him what to do with his property. The piece is not about free speech. It is about consolidating the megaphone in the hands of one man and his allied political coalition under the banner of freedom. The Mirror: the column’s hero is Elon Musk, who has personally intervened in Brazilian domestic politics and German election discourse — exactly the kind of foreign “censorship” intervention the column claims to oppose when foreigners do it to Americans. The September 2024 Brazilian Supreme Court dispute saw Musk personally defying court orders, suspending accounts of Brazilian officials, and treating Brazilian law as inapplicable to him — which is what every authoritarian foreign power the column mocks has done. The early 2025 German federal election saw X amplify AfD-aligned content through Musk’s own posts, with NPR, the Washington Post, and the Leibniz Institute for Media Research all documenting the intervention, in direct contradiction of the column’s framing of European regulation as the threat to free speech. The column’s selective use of “censorship” — applied to any platform decision Musk didn’t make, ignored when Musk does the same thing — is the central tell: they call it censorship when it constrains the powerful, and freedom when it amplifies them. The Hunter Biden laptop story, which the column invokes as proof of “suppression,” was initially restricted by Twitter’s pre-publication review process — a process Twitter applied across dozens of stories — not by Biden directive. The column knows the difference; it chooses not to mention it. That is the operation the column performs.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: For the most committed bad-faith actors and for catharsis among allies. Grotesque metaphor, hyperbolic comparisons, full receipts spine intact. No dehumanization; no slurs; no violence-license.

The column is what happens when the world’s richest man, having decided to make himself the editor-in-chief of the world’s most consequential conversation platform, hires a Fox News opinion editor to write the press release. The “freedom” the column celebrates is the freedom of one man to decide, at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, whether the Brazilian Supreme Court or the German election commission is allowed to communicate with their own citizens through his platform. Padmé watched the Republic’s Senate acclaim the reorganization that ended it; the contemporary version is watching Fox News acclaim the unilateral rule that ends American speech. The applause sounds the same in both. The “cartel” the column claims Musk broke was a coalition of platform executives making content decisions within the constraints of democratic regulation; the new cartel Musk installed is one man making content decisions within the constraints of his own portfolio. The treatment of European content regulation as the present threat to American free speech is projection at industrial scale: Musk’s own interventions in Brazilian and German politics, including direct defiance of court orders, make him a more active foreign regulator of allied democracies than any EU official has ever been of American speech. The Hunter Biden laptop story the column trots out was, on the documentary record, restricted by Twitter’s own pre-publication review of unverifiable material — a process that affected many stories of both political directions. The $787.5 million Dominion settlement Fox News paid in 2023 was for airing claims the network’s own hosts and executives knew were false — that is the model the column proposes for American media: not the censorship of democratic regulation, but the freedom to knowingly say what isn’t true, with the only check being the defamation damages the network’s accountants write down. The cup of trembling the column has been pouring for European regulators will, when the time comes, be drunk by the man who poured it.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: For the moral-witness reader, the closing of a Sunday column, the cadence that the prophetic register affords. Visceral moral disgust; canonical cadence; restrained profanity where it sharpens.

The piece performs, in its own small way, what the prophet named in Jeremiah: “they did not know how to blush.” It names “censorship” the ordinary work of platform accountability, and names “freedom” the unilateral decisions of one billionaire who has personally intervened in the domestic politics of two allied democracies. The “censorship vs. freedom” binary is the whitewash Ezekiel named over a rotten wall: the wall is rotten, and the whitewash is fresh. The column invokes Matthew 25’s least of these as “famous people” who “go viral,” as if Sophie Cunningham pointing were the same as a journalist in Ankara being silenced or a democracy advocate in São Paulo being shadow-banned. The free-speech tradition the column claims to defend — Milton, Mill, Brandeis, the Black freedom movement’s defense of speech against state suppression — was built on the proposition that the freedom matters precisely because the powerful will use every instrument they have against the least powerful. Musk’s “free speech” inverts this: it is the freedom of the most powerful voice in the room to drown out the smaller ones, with no democratic check, and the man himself has shown, on the record, precisely how little he gives a flying fuck about any standard but his own preference. The cup of trembling the prophet named in Isaiah 51 is what the man who bought Twitter has been pouring for the regulators of Brasília and Berlin, and the cup will, in time, come to his own hand. The Freedom the column celebrates is, in the Gospel’s exact phrase, a whitewashed tomb: an institution that performs as freedom what is, in substance, the unilateral rule of one man. The colonists who wrote the First Amendment did not write it for Elon Musk’s benefit; they wrote it against the King. The man the column calls its hero behaves like one.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: For the catharsis. Full expletive arsenal; gloves off; receipts spine intact. The reader who needs to feel the gears lock into place.

The column is horseshit, and the horseshit has a name: it is the world’s richest man having bought the world’s loudest microphone, installed himself as editor-in-chief, suspended journalists for reporting on his goddamned plane, defied the Brazilian Supreme Court, intervened in German elections, and hired a Fox News opinion editor to write a column calling it “free speech.” This is not a debate. This is not “one side has a point.” This is one billionaire being told, by a corporate-owned propaganda outlet, that his personal moderation decisions are “freedom” while democratic regulation is “censorship,” and the columnist is dead fucking serious. The Hunter Biden laptop story the column waves around was held by Twitter’s own pre-publication review of unverifiable material — a process Twitter was running across dozens of stories, including the original Marco Rubio campaign story about a small-donor database leak, which the column would have flagged if Twitter had failed to apply it. Fox News itself paid $787.5 million to Dominion for airing claims its own hosts and executives knew were fucking false, which is what actual unfettered “freedom” looks like inside this conservative-media architecture: the freedom to knowingly lie, with the only check being the defamation settlement that the network’s accountants have to write down. Musk’s X has banned journalists for reporting on his jet. Musk’s X has reinstated accounts he likes and banned accounts he doesn’t. Musk’s X has intervened personally in Brazilian politics. Musk’s X has amplified AfD content during German elections. Musk’s X has throttled links to The New York Times over editorial disputes. And this column calls that “free speech,” and this column calls European content moderation — which has its own fucking problems, the Online Safety Act is a genuine civil-liberties disaster — the existential threat to American liberty. The asymmetry is the point: every regulation is censorship when it constrains the powerful; every unilateral decision by the powerful is freedom when it amplifies their allies. Musk’s thumb on the scale has a fucking shape: it looks like Trump’s thumb with a Tesla logo superimposed. The column is not arguing. The column is performing the propaganda operation the title claims to oppose. Free speech my ass. This is a billionaire’s megaphone, and the column is the fucking press release.