‘Extra layer of protection’: Elon Musk’s X is laying the groundwork to censor ‘harmful’ election content

Billionaire Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, is laying the groundwork for 2024 election censorship, according to recent policy and hiring posts.

X will be implementing additional censorship policies during the time period around the 2024 election, it announced on Tuesday. The company intends to guarantee “an accurate and safe political discourse” and is also hiring people to tackle election-related “disinformation” on the platform, according to an X job description for information operations senior specialists posted on Aug. 11.

X will enable political advertising on the platform, update its Civic Integrity Policy and increase its Community Notes tool, which allows certain individuals to “add context to posts,” according to the announcement. Its current Civic Integrity Policy is from January and empowers X to delete posts and ban accounts for “misleading information.”

“During elections, our Civic Integrity Policy provides an extra layer of protection that is applied for a limited period of time before and during an election,” X states in its Tuesday announcement. “We’re updating this policy to make sure we strike the right balance between tackling the most harmful types of content—those that could intimidate or deceive people into surrendering their right to participate in a civic process—and not censoring political debate.”

The updated policy will adhere to the “freedom of speech, not reach” enforcement doctrine, according to the announcement. The enforcement allows people to post what they want, but if it breaks the rules, X suppresses it so others are far less likely to see it.

Further, the information operations senior specialists X is hiring will “support investigative and response efforts across a wide range of critical issues, including … election interference,” according to the job posting.

Musk, who owns X, and CEO Linda Yaccarino have both advocated for free speech on the platform.

X censored a New York Post report regarding then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop shortly before the 2020 election and well before Musk took over in October 2022. X’s censorship team before Musk’s takeover was uniformly left-wing, the Daily Caller reported.

Upon assuming control of the company, Musk has released batches of “Twitter Files” which are internal company documents revealing censorship, including emails related to the decision by X to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

X did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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