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Elon Musk will face mounting pressure to censor on X ahead of 2024 election: free speech advocate

Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter, is 'under an extraordinary amount of pressure, and that pressure is going to continue to mount as the election approaches,' internet freedom advocate Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson

2 short vids and text.

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/elon-musk-will-face-mounting-pressure-to-censor-on-x-ahead-of-2024-election-free-speech-advocate/

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— Matt Lamb (@MattLamb22) February 21, 2024

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— Matt Lamb (@MattLamb22) February 21, 2024

(LifeSiteNews) — Elon Musk is facing “extraordinary” pressure to censor speech leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

X, formerly known as Twitter, is “under an extraordinary amount of pressure, and that pressure is going to continue to mount as the election approaches,” internet freedom advocate Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson recently.

Benz is a former cyber official with the State Department and now runs the Foundation for Freedom Online. He has previously warned about election interference by the national security apparatus.

Throughout the interview he detailed how the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and other federal entities have suppressed internet speech. The GEC was targeted in a federal lawsuit by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and Texas due to its work funding and promoting software that labels right-leaning outlets as risky for advertisers.

Carlson asked Benz: “[W]e’re at the very beginning of an election year with a couple of different wars unfolding simultaneously in 2024. So do you expect that that platform can stay free for the duration of this year?”

Benz said Musk “has a unique buffer” since “the national security state is actually quite reliant on Elon Musk properties,” mentioning Space X, Tesla, and battery technology.

So instead, Benz said, the feds are seeking “death by a thousand paper cuts.”

He told Carlson:

There are dependencies that the national security state has on Elon Musk. I’m not sure he’d have as much room to negotiate if he had become the world’s richest man, selling at a lemonade stand. And if the national security state goes too hard on him by invoking something like [the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] to sort of nationalize some of these properties, I think the shockwave that it would send to the international investor community would be irrecoverable at a time when we’re engaged in great power competition.

Instead, the federal government is seeking a “regime change” through investigations.

“I think there are 7 or 8 different Justice Department or SEC or FTC investigations into Elon Musk properties that all started, after his acquisition of X,” Benz said.

The other plan is to use both state and international laws to limit Musk and X’s power to promote free and open debate, something Benz called a “Transatlantic Flank Attack 2.0.”

Mentioning how the “censorship industry” is “a bunch of State Department exiles” who left when Donald Trump unexpectedly won in 2016, Benz said the censors have taken their plans elsewhere.

He said:

One of [the strategies] is state level censorship laws. California just passed a new law which the censorship industry totally drove from start to finish around.

They call it platform accountability and transparency, which is basically forcing Elon Musk to give over the kind of narrative mapping data that these CIA conduits and Pentagon cutouts were using to create these weapons of mass deletion, these abilities to just censor everything at scale because they had all the internal platform data. Elon Musk took that away. They’re using state laws like this new California law to crack that open.

The other “major threat” comes from Europe, he said, mentioning the EU Digital Services Act, “cooked up in tandem with folks like NewsGuard.”

NewsGuard is a Global Engagement Center-linked entity that has been proven to be biased against conservative news outlets. Its board members include former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, and other national security officials.

These officials are “working with the EU to craft the censorship laws that now are the largest existential threat to X other than potential advertiser boycotts, because there is now disinformation is now banned as a matter of law in, in the EU.”

“And the EU is a bigger market for X than the US. There’s only 300 million some people in the U.S. There’s 450 million in Europe,” Benz said.

The company must either “forfeit 6% of their global annual revenue to the EU” or create “an internal mechanism to censor anything that the EU, which is just a proxy for NATO, deems to be disinformation.”

“And you can bet with 65 elections around the globe this year, you can predict every single time what they’re going to define disinformation as,” Benz said. “So that’s the main the main fight right now is, is dealing with the transatlantic flank attack from Europe.”