Many know that I take a break from social media on Saturdays; I spend the day doing anything but checking Facebook, Threads or other social media platforms in an effort to give my brain and blood pressure a break (this past Saturday was spent with bestie Sarah and fur-nephews Charlie and Ollie, trying to get my laundry caught up).

Typically when I sign back in sometime Sunday, there’s not a lot that I’ve missed. But that was another administration.

Oh, how I miss the days of boring, workaday reporting out of Washington, when there wasn’t some new outrage every hour. Apparently government functionality is overrated, at least according to those people who voted for Donald Trump and those who didn’t vote at all.

I knew a little of what was going on already with Elon Musk and access to government systems (Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted access to Musk’s team Friday, and I’d be surprised if any of them have proper security clearance; Musk supposedly has top secret clearance granted by the White House), but the extent hadn’t been reported just yet by major media. I won’t get much into that because it’s not what I want to talk about today.

When I checked my Threads feed Sunday, in addition to finding a new account or two to follow, I found several posts on free speech.

Gosh, I wonder why.

Monday it ramped up even more, thanks in part to a tweet purportedly by Musk: “Anyone protesting the Trump Administration will be suspended from X. All anti-Trump drama can go to a liberal echo chamber like Threads, Reddit, BlueSky, Instagram and Facebook.”

(I tried and failed to find it in his feed, but the man tweets so much that wading through it takes forever; still, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s fake, even though it tracks with other statements he’s made.)

Whether that tweet was real or fake, the TechDirt website reported Monday that Musk posted, in reply to a tweet from @RayInsideOut listing the names of the techs helping Musk gain entry to the U.S. Treasury payment system, “You have committed a crime.” He then had the list removed, saying it violated rules (it now appears that he has banned the account; Wired, which reported extensively on his helpers Monday, was still tweeting as of early Monday evening).

For someone who so often crows about free speech on X/Twitter, that seems pretty odd.

In regard to the access given to Musk and his team of young’uns, Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told Wired, “What we’re seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government. We really have very little eyes on what’s going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what’s happening because these aren’t really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”

Add to that all the tweeting Musk has done, spreading lies and conspiracy theories about USAID and other agencies’ work when he’s acting as both the owner of a social-media platform and someone working under the authority of the president (not to mention all the conflicts of interest posed by his government contracts), and you have the sort of situation you might expect to see in a tinpot dictatorship … or Russia.

TechDirt wrote of the incident with @RayInsideOut’s tweet: “Let’s be crystal clear about what just happened: A powerful government official who happens to own a major social media platform (among many other businesses) just declared that naming government employees is criminal (it’s not) and then used his private platform to suppress that information. These aren’t classified operatives—they’re public servants who, theoretically, work for the American people and the Constitution, not Musk’s personal agenda.

“This doesn’t just ‘seem like’ a First Amendment issue—it’s a textbook example of what the First Amendment was designed to prevent. The Supreme Court’s Bantam Books v. Sullivan precedent makes clear that government officials can’t use their position to coerce private entities into censorship. Musk isn’t just suggesting removal—he’s doing it directly.”

The problem isn’t that Musk, the private citizen who owns X/Twitter, did that, because platforms make their own rules about who can use the platform and any rules they must follow in order to do so (those terms and conditions so many people ignore). The problem is that, as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (which, again, is not an official agency of the government, not having been established by Congress, and Musk went through no confirmation process), he appears to essentially be acting as a government censor, which the Constitution clearly enjoins government from doing.

(For those now yelling, “What about Biden?” … well, the Supreme Court threw out that lawsuit about the administration supposedly directing social media companies in content moderation, with Amy Coney Barrett citing in the majority ruling, according to the SCOTUS Blog, “the lack of any ‘concrete link’ between the restrictions that the plaintiffs complained of and the conduct of government officials.”)

So … should we worry about our free-speech rights in light of what’s happened? Probably, yes, but it could be much ado about little. Still, keep wary.

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No discussion of free speech would be complete without reminding everyone that all of our rights come with responsibilities (yes, even the Second Amendment; fight me). When talking about free speech, that means that if you knowingly say or write something that is provably false, you can be held liable for the damage it causes (recall the example of falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater).

A few examples of not having that right taken away:

✅ Someone fact-checking you doesn’t mean they’ve violated your free-speech rights; they simply showed (hopefully with links to primary sources or to a fact-checker that links to those sources) that what you said was false.

🚫 A social-media platform banning you from posting isn’t necessarily a violation of your free-speech rights (though if the owner is a government official …). Platforms have the right as private businesses (publicly traded or not doesn’t make a difference) to set their own rules, which users have to abide by.

❌ Someone deleting your hateful comments on their posts and/or blocking you on social media didn’t violate your rights. Just as platforms can make their own rules, so can those who post on those platforms, as long as they follow the platform rules. (Here on WordPress, we can set up our blogs so that new commenters have to be approved by the administrator of the blog, which can cut down on trolls.) While you have the right to say just about anything (short of incitement to violence, threats, obscenity, child pornography, defamation, etc.), there is no right guaranteeing you an audience, and you might have to face consequences for what you say. Having comments deleted or being blocked is pretty tame as far as consequences go.

We need to be very clear about what counts as rights being taken away. Especially if we want people to take us seriously.