Elon Musk’s absolutist version of free speech has thrown the world’s richest man and his X social media platform into the crosshairs of governments worldwide.

In the UK, officials are weighing tougher rules for sites like X after a surge of online disinformation fuelled an outbreak of riots. In India, X was ordered this year to remove posts and block certain accounts in response to farmer protests. And in Brazil, Musk is in a running battle with the nation’s highest court over its orders to suspend users who had circulated fake news.

Taken together, the moves amount to a crackdown by some of the world’s largest democracies against what officials see as a wave of hate speech and disinformation. Yet any attempt to rein in social media expression runs headlong into Musk’s hands-off approach to user posts, a “free speech” pledge that he defends ardently on the website formerly known as Twitter, which he acquired for US$44-billion in late 2022 and promptly refashioned into X.

That commitment to letting users say whatever they want has cost X advertising revenue and put him at the centre of political battles throughout the world. “It turns out free speech is actually really expensive,” he posted earlier this year. Critics say that “free speech” defence has shielded users who promote hate speech and falsehoods.

While the issues facing X are familiar to large social media companies, Musk adds additional elements to these fights — including claims from opponents that he’s exposing his own political biases.

“What’s different is how he’s pulling so much of it into the spotlight,” said Katie Harbath, a former public policy executive at Meta Platforms and current global affairs officer at Duco Experts, a consultancy firm that works with companies on trust and safety issues. “Their method of pushing back is very aggressive.”

Musk vs Starmer

Following the arrests of about a dozen people in Britain for inflammatory online content connected to recent riots, Musk responded “true” to a post by Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage calling the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, “the biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history”. Starmer’s office pushed back on Monday against Farage’s comments yet steered clear of igniting a war of words with X’s billionaire owner.

The latest challenge to Musk emerged when Olympic boxing champion Imane Khelif filed a cyber-harassment complaint in France that named the billionaire, according to Variety. Her lawyer told the magazine that Musk and other high-profile figures had amplified online attacks over Khelif’s gender identity, which was called into question on her way to winning a gold medal in women’s boxing during the Paris Olympics.

Representatives for Musk didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Read: Trump, Musk online chat hit by embarrassing glitches

Any crackdown on X raises the question of how far governments will go to curb content they see as harmful, especially in democracies that value free expression. No platform has borne the brunt of their efforts more than X, which has a long history of carrying controversial material — even before Musk bought it.

This was perhaps most notable during Donald Trump’s first term, when the then-US president pushed the boundaries of Twitter decorum and forced the company’s hand when it came to rules around speech. After Trump posted falsehoods about mail-in ballots ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter began labelling his posts with links to more information, but did not take them down. He was ultimately banned following the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, but after buying the company Musk restored Trump’s account.

Since taking over, Musk has largely abandoned X’s prior efforts to curb misinformation, instead relying on crowd-sourced Community Notes and asking users to police themselves. Musk made deep cuts to teams that wrote and enforced company rules, part of a cost-cutting effort but also a move that aligned with his belief that X was too heavy-handed when it comes to policing user speech.

Earlier this week, Musk drew a warning letter from Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market chief, who urged X to abide by the region’s rules against harmful content, especially in light of recent UK violence. Breton’s letter — posted on X — reminded Musk that the bloc is already taking formal steps against the platform over alleged violations of the Digital Services Act.

Musk responded to Breton with a taunting, expletive-filled post to his nearly 200 million followers on X.

EU officials have made fighting fake news a top priority, recently sharpening their powers to deal with illegal and harmful content. The EU can now levy fines of as much as 6% of annual sales against large social media platforms found to have violated new content moderation rules.

In the US, curbing content on X poses a political challenge ahead of a bitterly contested election. Musk, who has increasingly aligned himself with conservative figures, last month endorsed Trump for president and is supporting a super-PAC backing the Republican nominee. On Monday, Musk hosted a conversation on X with Trump that lasted more than two hours, flattering his guest and floating a role for himself in a future administration if the former president wins in November.

False information

Democrats have seized on Musk’s support for Trump with complaints that X is throttling or suspending posts that feature liberal viewpoints or favour Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Representative Jerrold Nadler, the top Democrat on the house judiciary committee, has urged the Republican-led panel to investigate whether X’s artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, has propagated false information, including that Harris had missed ballot deadlines in nine states.

Under US law, regulators have little recourse to bar harmful online content, thanks to a provision in the 1996 Communications Decency Act known as section 230 that shields websites from liability for third-party content on their platforms. While lawmakers in both parties agree on the need to update the nearly three-decade-old measure, Republicans and Democrats disagree vehemently over what changes to make.

Authoritarian governments have shown less restraint in dealing with X. Following a disputed election that opponents and international observers said he lost, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on 8 August said he was suspending access to X in the country for 10 days. He accused Musk of fomenting disorder by questioning the vote count on X and posting “Shame on Dictator Maduro”.

Elsewhere in Latin America, Brazilian officials are engaged in a protracted dispute with X over posts on the site by disaffected supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro who claim without evidence that his loss in the country’s 2022 election was due to fraud. After Bolsonaro supporters stormed buildings in the capital Brasília in January 2023, supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes opened an inquiry into whether Musk had sought to use X to wage “a disinformation campaign” and ordered the suspension of some accounts in Brazil.

Musk initially responded saying he would defy the court order, accusing Moraes of violating free speech rights and calling for his impeachment. The company later relented, saying it would comply after all.

On Tuesday, Musk revived the feud by posting some confidential orders purportedly issued by Moraes. Musk used the documents to claim that X was “being asked to censor content in Brazil where the censorship demands require us to violate Brazilian law! That is not right.” — Kurt Wagner and Michael Shepard, with Billy House, Daniel Carvalho, Benoit Berthelot, Olivia Solon, Ellen Milligan, Eleanor Thornber and Jeff Stone, (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP