Remember when Elon Musk told us he was taking over Twitter specifically to save "free speech" from government interference?
Back then, Musk told us that old Twitter had become part of a government-controlled "censorship-industrial complex" that had to be destroyed.
In 2022, Musk assured us he was buying Twitter not because it made business sense for some evil oligarch.
He was doing it for us, the people.
In this telling, Musk was a hero saving us from a platform that cruelly asked users to adhere to its Terms of Service and fiendishly invested in personnel who were paid to enforce the company's publicly stated policies.
- "This is not a way to make money.... I don't care about the economics at all," he said.
- "Truth matters to me, a lot," he said.
- Twitter would be "a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive," he assured us.
Of course, it didn't quite turn out that way.
Under Elon, trust and safety teams were fired. Content moderation was abandoned. Blue check verification became pay-for-play. Hate speech was not simply permitted — it was incentivized.
Elon Musk — a racist, misogynistic memelord with a penchant for sharing many of the world's most vicious and despicable conspiracy theories — became the self-appointed dictator of the "world's town square," boosting his own tweets even as he championed violence over democracy, turned X into the world's biggest porn site, and launched new AI tools that, even after a global outcry, continue to allow users to create and share non-consensual sexual imagery featuring children, celebrities and regular people.
And what became of Musk's promise to deliver free speech, 100% free of government intervention?
As of 2026, X is now the official, State Department-endorsed platform of Trump Administration propaganda and psy ops.
Let that sink in
On 30 March 2026, The Guardian reported that:
The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.
The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio... also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit... Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.
Calling it "the end of platform independence," Lawfare's Kate Klonick wrote on 1 April:
The idea that the State Department would issue a formal cable endorsing a specific social media platform by name as a tool of U.S. diplomacy—let alone military psychological operations—would have been, until recently, almost unthinkable. But the structural transformation that has taken place over years has made the news feel almost ordinary today. It was a transformation that dismantled, piece by piece, the legal accountability, operational independence and institutional resilience that once made such a cozy relationship between government and platforms inconceivable.
Klonick, who is also a law professor at St. John's University, was a guest on the Tech Policy Press podcast on 5 April, where she noted:
The closer that government and industry and platforms get, the more they can align and coordinate against user citizens, the greater risk to user citizens' privacy and speech.
By taking Twitter (now X) private, she explained:
Musk can just really, he can be as absolutely evil billionaire, megalomaniac dictator about the speech policies of X as he wants to be. He can shadow-ban and down rank whoever he wants to. He has kicked tons of people (off) and banned them on the platform. He promoted his own posts and the posts of his friends. He is openly working with far right movements in Europe before elections to promote various parties and demote other types of parties.
In other words, the same Elon Musk who falsely claimed that the publicly traded Twitter was part of an imaginary "censorship-industrial complex" has now turned the shadowy, privately owned X into exactly that.
Isn't this a bigger scandal that the Twitter Files?
As readers of this newsletter may remember the "Twitter Files" were a nothingburger that right-wing media turned into the biggest fake story since Pizzagate.
After buying Twitter, Musk leaned into the "scandal" by giving select independent journo-grifters (like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger) access to internal Twitter communications showing how previous management handled content moderation.
The "Twitter Files" focused heavily on the temporary suppression of the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story and extensive, routine communications between Twitter executives and federal agencies (like the FBI and DHS) regarding topics such as election integrity and moderation.
Rather than exposing a coordinated "censorship industrial complex," all the "Twitter Files" actually revealed was just how messy, subjective, and difficult content moderation at scale actually is.
Meanwhile, what the recently leaked State Department cable reveals is, says Kate Klonick:
Way worse than anything that they had evidence of in the Biden administration. And there just seems to be no trace of irony and no trace of just that they have just switched this position now that this shoe is on the other foot and that they're in charge of the government and that they have friends that are running these social media platforms. And it's an incredible lack of principle and hypocrisy.
Musk turned X into the government's favorite "Nazi Bar"
As a London bus-shelter poster from the UK activist group "Everyone Hates Elon" once read: "If the bar lets Nazis in, it's a Nazi bar."
Before Musk took over Twitter, everyone knew where the Nazis gathered. They were relegated to extreme fringe spaces or losers-only platforms like Gab and Parler.
Musk quickly signaled to these losers he was one of them.
As a result, as the Nazis flocked to Twitter, millions of regular users fled.
But most, ultimately, stayed.
And despite all of Elon's ongoing outrages, most advertisers have come back, too.
Today, the platform's stance on free speech is entirely synonymous with Musk's personal discretion. Which means X fiercely fights democratic tech regulations in Europe and Brazil. But Elon plays ball with state-backed information operations when the politics—or his business interests—align. And when Saudi Arabia, his biggest outside investor, literally executes people for tweets he stays completely quiet.
In the U.S., Musk remains fully aligned with the far-right, white-nationalist wing of the GOP.
His animosity toward minorities, women, and his own trans daughter means that, whatever spats may occur along the way, Musk will always come back to the fascist fold.
He's always willing to put his money—and his algorithm—where his mouth is.
And the Trump Administration understands that completely.
That's why, as Kate Klonick told Tech Policy Press: "They think that they think they have X in their pocket, that it is like a pseudo government in service of the US government... and that's terrifying."
Thanks for reading and sharing! And an extra special THANK YOU to all my paid subscribers, past and present, and contributors to my "coffee fund." While paid subscriptions are always welcome, I’m continuing to offer all content free, so choosing a “free” subscription means you'll never miss an issue of UNPRECEDENTED.
To support this newsletter without subscribing, consider a one-time tip at Buy Me a Coffee.
Further reading from November 2025: The Incredible Shrinking Marco
"History (if Elon's AI allows it) will show that Rubio is responsible for an era of anti-Christian cruelty that will, within just a few years, make America complicit in the deaths of 14 million human beings, including 4.5 million children under age 5."
The Incredible Shrinking Marco
As Secretary of State, Rubio’s cruelty trumps his Christianity
Richard Hine
Subscribe to Unprecedented
Subscribe to the newsletter and unlock access to member-only content.