Elon Musk saying civil war is inevitable is not inciting violence. Here’s why

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, whom Elon Musk calls a “censorship commissar”, turned to me under the hot studio lights of Q&A last Monday night. “Musk tweeted ‘Civil war is inevitable’,” Julie Inman Grant said. “It was incitement.”

“No,” I shot back, “that was not ‘incitement’.”

The host, Patricia Karvelas, clarified: “So you don’t think that’s incitement? Because a lot of people don’t agree with you.”

She’s right. They don’t agree with me. And they’re wrong.

The debate over free speech, hate speech, online harms, algorithms and social media is tangling us up in knots. Let’s get back to first principles, because our ability to survive the 21st century depends on it.

First, the eSafety Commissioner is dead right that Elon Musk is no champion of free speech. The man is suing companies to force them to keep advertising on Twitter (let’s not indulge his “X” nonsense). In the video explaining the lawsuit, his CEO, Linda Yaccarino, wore a pendant around her neck that read “FREE SPEECH”, literally draping herself in the rhetoric of freedom while attacking the freedom of others. As a columnist for the libertarian Cato Institute put it: “Musk’s theory of ‘free speech’ is … those he agrees with should be free to speak their minds … but nobody else should be allowed to criticise or disassociate from them in response.”

A second point of agreement is that speech isn’t really “free” if software engineers are designing algorithms to spy on your behaviour and promote whatever will hook your attention. A social-media feed that purports to be a window turns into a mirror. It’s a rabbit hole designed to reinforce your prejudices. Nuance isn’t addictive.

To combat this, the world’s governments must require social media and AI companies to report internal data that lets digital activists and journalists understand what the algorithm is selecting, what it’s doing to us, and how to provide better alternatives. In her transparency efforts, the eSafety Commissioner should be supported.

But something more is afoot here. Underneath the high-minded safetyism of the online-harm brigade is an instinct to punish bad ideas by labelling them as inciting, insulting or offensive. It’s a habit as tired as Stalin’s moustache. You profess your support for free speech (who doesn’t? It’s like supporting kittens and rainbows) but with “appropriate limits”.

Vladimir Putin supports free speech, too, according to Vladimir Putin. He just doesn’t support hate speech against the fine men and women defending the (Russian) common good through their valiant work in Ukraine. That’s a crime, as the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen found out in July when a Russian court convicted them in absentia to eight years in jail. Well-meaning apparatchiks in the Australian Immigration Department this week delayed Gessen’s Australian visa, reportedly demanding arduous dossiers to determine whether Vlad wasn’t onto something in questioning Gessen’s fitness for gentle Australian ears.

Elon Musk, no champion of free speech, shuts down his opponents.

In Malaysia – the world’s most enthusiastic issuer of TikTok takedown requests – opposition MPs and government critics find their social media accounts limited or blocked to “create a safer online ecosystem and a better user experience, especially for children and families” in the words of the country’s equivalent of our eSafety Commissioner, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission. Indonesia and Singapore are considering similar laws to prevent online “harm”.

The UK government is keen to play in this space. Bobbies show up at people’s doors to arrest them for being awful on social media. (And here I was, thinking that was the point.) The British government itself issued an almost comically Orwellian Twitter warning: “Think before you post”. England’s director of public prosecutions recently boasted that you can be arrested for tweeting something “insulting or abusive” and congratulated his “dedicated police officers who are scouring social media”.

This must feel reassuring to the victims of the 2.3 million crimes that go unsolved in the UK each year. Fear not, Nanna can no longer complain about migrants on Facebook. Not all heroes wear capes.

London police recently prevented a businessman in a yarmulke from crossing the street during a Gaza protest, under threat of arrest, because his “openly Jewish” appearance was considered a provocation.

On Monday, the UK government announced it was reclassifying misogyny as a form of “extremism”, making it easier to prosecute. What’s misogynistic, though? Is it misogynistic to insist that biological males who identify as women should compete in female sporting events? Some feminists say so. Yet in Twitter’s pre-Musk era, such feminists were banned for tweeting things like “women aren’t men”. Who gets to decide what’s offensive?

We know who gets to decide, of course. Elites do. At the moment, that means the clique of university-educated, cosmopolitan social-justice types who set the tone in the arts, media, HR, public policy and mainstream politics. In other words, people like me.

But we won’t be in charge forever. If the populist right that’s roiling Europe and Trumpland makes its way to Australia, offensive speech may no longer be defined as targeting migrants and trans people and people of colour. It could be defined as content that demeans white Australian history, contaminates cultural unity or attacks family values. It’s happened in Italy. It almost just happened in France. Brexit happened. Trump happened. These movements get their mojo by posturing against the censoriousness of the puritanical left. Don’t take the bait. Don’t play their game.

If you make it hazardous for reasonable people to discuss controversial issues, then only unreasonable people will do so. If you say it’s racist to discuss the integration of migrants, only racists will discuss it.

In decades to come, we will look back on the current moment as the fledgling, early steps of a species trying to grapple with a revolution in how it communicates with itself. We’re a baby giraffe trying to stand up. All wobbly knees and placental goo.

It is our generation’s job to figure out how to manage this informational tidal wave. To do so, we need a population that feels heard, that feels it’s understood. We need a public square with capacious borders. We need to accept that genuinely getting your hands dirty wrestling with ideas can sometimes sound, to the ears of noble public-minded witch-hunters, offensive. That’s the price of admission to democracy.

The truth is, I don’t know exactly what’s incitement and what’s not. You don’t, either. What we should know is that a government information arm should not decide the question for us. I disagree with Elon Musk. But in an open society, the disagreement is the point.

Josh Szeps is host of the podcast Uncomfortable Conversations. He will appear at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas this weekend, and with Coleman Hughes in Melbourne on Wednesday.