Kamala Harris vs. Elon Musk

The Democratic nominee has favored policing online speech. Would a future Harris administration defend free expression?

Would President Kamala Harris shut down X, the social media site now run by Elon Musk? Supporters of former President Donald Trump—including Musk himself—certainly seem to think so.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent semi-candidate for president who is currently backing Trump, suggested as much last week. He reposted an old video clip on X of Harris in which she said: "There has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation, and that has to stop."

RFK Jr. transcribed part of the clip and wrote that Harris also said: "He [Musk] has lost his privileges."

Kamala Harris: "He [Musk] has lost his privileges."
Can someone please explain to her that freedom of speech is a RIGHT, not a "privilege"?

Kamala Harris: "There has to be a responsibility placed on these social media sites to understand their power."
Translation: "If they… https://t.co/BzuTYoJjuV

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 2, 2024

But Harris was not referring to Musk; she was referring to Trump. In fact, the clip—which Musk shared as well—is from 2019, long before Musk acquired Twitter and renamed it X.

Accuracy is important, and both RFK Jr. and Musk should modify their comments so that their sizable audiences understand that Harris did not threaten to take down Musk, or all of X, or anything of that sort. At the same time, this incident provides a worthwhile reminder that 2019-era Harris was positively obsessed with getting Trump kicked off Twitter. Her monomaniacal focus on deplatforming Trump is representative of some of the worst tendencies in progressive speech policing and does not bode well for a future Harris administration.

Tweeting About Trump

In 2019, Harris ran for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. She withdrew at the end of the year, in December, before any votes had been cast in the primaries, and ultimately endorsed the winner, Joe Biden.

But she was in the race long enough to participate in the October 15 Democratic primary presidential debate, alongside Biden and a slew of other candidates, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and others. One particularly tense exchange took place between Harris and Warren, when the latter pointedly refused to endorse the former's assertion that Twitter must ban Trump from the platform.

This clip is from 2019, when Kamala Harris kicked off a push to remove Trump from Twitter (and spark life into her failing campaign.)

It failed. Harris tried to pressure other candidates to join her but candidates like Elizabeth Warren dismissed her pic.twitter.com/TakvFOjBkn

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) September 3, 2024

Harris laid into Warren, saying: "I was surprised to hear that you did not agree with me that on this subject of what should be the rules around corporate responsibility for these Big Tech companies, when I called on Twitter to suspend Donald Trump's account, that you did not agree. And I would urge you to join me, because here we have Donald Trump, who has 65 million Twitter followers and is using that platform as the president of the United States to openly intimidate witnesses, to threaten witnesses, to obstruct justice. And he and his account should be taken down. We saw in El Paso that that shooter in his manifesto was informed by how Donald Trump uses that platform, and this is a matter of corporate responsibility. Twitter should be held accountable and shut down that site. It is a matter of safety and corporate accountability."

Warren responded by asserting that she had more pressing concerns than dealing with Trump's account specifically. (These concerns included vast new antitrust initiatives that would reduce the influence of social media platforms, which would also be bad.)

It was after the debate, during an interview with Jake Tapper, that Harris said of Trump, "He has lost his privileges" on social media and ought to be banned.

Subsequently, Harris served as President Biden's veep and was thus complicit in the administration's vast pressure campaign to motivate social media companies to take down contrarian content relating to Hunter Biden, elections, and COVID-19. Her remarks at the debate, all those years ago, expose an obsession with policing disfavored speech online. And as Harris herself said in a recent interview with CNN: "My values have not changed."

Banned in Brazil

In recent weeks, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has taken increasingly aggressive steps to force Musk to purge alleged disinformation from the platform, ordering the removal of over 140 accounts. When Musk refused, Moraes ordered the blocking of X for all Brazilians. People who use a VPN to evade the block and access X anyway can face fines of almost $9,000 a day.

This is brazenly authoritarian. As The Washington Post wrote in an editorial lambasting such censorship: "Whatever the threat to democracy that the accounts Mr. Moraes wanted gone might have posed, the threat from one government official limiting the speech of 220 million people is greater. Taken together with Mr. Moraes's choice to freeze the assets of internet-provider Starlink, a separate company of Mr. Musk's, this move aligns Brazil not with the free world but with the likes of China and Russia."

Yet not everyone agrees. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a former Democratic member of Congress and former deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, posted on X, "Obrigado Brasil!" which translates to "Thank you, Brazil!" The comment was widely interpreted as support for Moraes's regime of censorship.

It is worrisome to see a prominent Democrat applauding a foreign government's efforts to censor an American company. Free speech is under significant threat from a rogue judge in Brazil, from the Chinese Communist Party, and even from European Union tech regulators. Would a future Harris administration stand up for the fundamental principles of the First Amendment and defend the legal right to engage in disfavored speech, or would she seek to bring X, Facebook, and Google under greater government control?

This Week on Free Media

Amber Duke is back! We discuss Harris' flip-flopping, Biden's low profile, a Meet the Press mistake, and more.

Worth Watching

Last week, I mentioned that I was replaying one of my favorite video games: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I have now moved on to its sequel, which might literally be my favorite game of all time: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Here's part of my 2020 review commemorating its 20th anniversary:

Majora's Mask is a surprisingly sophisticated, lyrical meditation on the theme of coping with one's own mortality. It forces players to consider what the sudden, unexpected end of civilization would look like at the micro level: for a mailman who's run out of time to deliver his last letter, for the frustrated director of a theater troupe, for a lonely dairy farmer, and so on. Sometimes the hero doesn't save the world. Sometimes there are no good outcomes. Sometimes it's simply too late.…

A long list of horrors awaits Link: a tree with a pained expression, later revealed to be a runaway son deformed and murdered by the Skull Kid; the ghost of a hero who died in an avalanche; a farm beset by alien (yes, alien) abductions. The game's rigid schedule makes the horror more real. If Link visits the park north of town on the first night—and only the first night—he can save an old woman from a mugging. If he fails, he must buy her purloined goods from the pawn shop on night two. There's a haunted house on a forlorn beach, but Link has to cleanse it before the third day, at which point the owner loses interest. It hardly matters, because everything resets when Link travels back through time at the end of the three-day cycle. Visit the town's laundry pool at just the right moment, and a circus performer will confess that a fit of jealousy caused him to steal a magic artifact from the circus's leader: a dog. "Why was the dog the leader??" the perplexed performer wonders. Why, indeed?

This is a fantastical game that bears little resemblance to anything from the worlds of fantasy, and the game's visual style and musical cues reinforces the theme of dread. The townsfolk are pointy humanoids with exaggerated smiles and frowns. The swamp's color scheme is green and purple, giving it an unwell feeling. The background music gradually intensifies as time marches on, and the last five minutes of the third day produce a cacophony of bells and sorrowful sounds. Even the upbeat tunes have a note of understated sadness to them.