On November 9, Elon Musk shared a video posted by president-elect Donald Trump and captioned it with a single capitalized word, “YES!” In the video, Trump shouts at the camera for a whole six-and-a-half minutes and insists that he will “shatter the left-wing censorship regime and reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans.” This regime was, Trump claimed, run by “a sinister group of deep-state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media.” Over the last few years, these groups have conspired to suppress “vital information on everything from elections to public health.”

The president-elect has vowed to take five steps to smash the “censorship cartel.” He will, he claims, ban federal agencies from labeling “domestic speech as mis- or disinformation”; fire “every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship directly or indirectly”; have the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute “all parties involved in the new online censorship regime”; revisit Section 230 of the Communications Act, which provides immunity from civil liabilities for service providers that restrict access to content they deem obscene; defund “the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called mis- and disinformation, including universities”; and pass a “Digital Bill of Rights,” the content of which is still unclear, which is also to grant anyone over eighteen the right to “opt out of content moderation and curation entirely.”

YES!
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 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2024