Is Elon Musk censoring journalists?

Is Elon Musk’s X as free and open as he claims it is? Despite all his talk about turning the site formerly known as Twitter into a haven for free speech, X now stands accused of censoring a journalist, locking her out of her account and blocking the spread of her article.

Jacqueline Sweet’s piece in Spectator World is a debunking of claims that Musk has an online alter ego. Speculation has been raging for some time now that a 200,000-follower X account bearing the name Adrian Dittmann is actually run by Musk himself. Users of X – and even mainstream publications – have long entertained this theory.

The claim is based on the fact that the account appears to be run by an enthusiastic Musk fanboy. It regularly posts in praise of Musk and the changes he has made to the platform. What’s more, whenever Dittmann has spoken on Spaces, X’s audio platform, other users have noticed striking similarities between his and Musk’s voices.

If this all sounds ridiculously far-fetched, that’s because it is. Last weekend, Sweet debunked these claims in Spectator World. It turns out that the ‘Adrian Dittmann’ account really is run by a man called Arian Dittmann, who is the son of a German entrepreneur and lives in Fiji.

Case closed? Not quite. Shortly after the Spectator World article went live, Sweet discovered that her X account had been suspended for 30 days for violating the platform’s rules. She wasn’t told which rule she had specifically broken, however.

There is speculation that the article broke X’s rule against ‘doxxing’ (that is, revealing a person’s identity against their will), even though Dittmann has seemingly been posting under his real name.

Worse still, other Xers have found they are unable to share links to Sweet’s article. Some have been met with a generic error message, while others have been warned about the article’s ‘potentially harmful’ content.

Many have compared this alleged censorship to when Twitter, as it was then known, blocked anyone from sharing the New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop back in 2020. The New York Post was locked out of its account and users were issued similar warnings about the story being ‘unsafe’ whenever they tried to share it.

Ironically, it was Musk himself who helped to uncover the scale of the old Twitter’s censorship regime, after he bought the platform in 2022. He allowed journalists to dig into old staff emails and the site’s backend to compile the so-called Twitter Files. He has even described himself as a ‘free-speech absolutist’. When he took over Twitter, he repeatedly promised to free it from the censors.

Musk’s X may be much freer than the old Twitter, but his promise of total freedom of speech appears not to have been kept. If his seeming foray into censorship tells us anything, it’s that we can never rely on the benevolence of billionaires to uphold our precious rights.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.