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    Elon Announces Pro-First Amendment Campaign

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    In a post on X, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that he would be funding a massive First Amendment campaign to push back on the “attacks on free speech” that he sees as taking place across the nation. The Tesla CEO and X owner’s pledge came on Thursday, April 18, and appears to have been sparked by comments the NPR CEO made about online information.

    As background, NPR CEO Katherine Maher has been caught describing her opposition to free speech in a video from June of 2021, during the  Atlantic Council’s 360/Open Summit. During that speech, Maher, who was then the CEO of Wikimedia, which oversees Wikipedia, explained that she saw it as being her duty to fight back against so-called disinformation and, when doing so, argued that the First Amendment is a “challenge” to doing so.

    She said, “The number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States. [It] is a fairly robust protection of rights and that is a protection of rights both for platforms, which I actually think is very important that platforms have those rights to be able to regulate what kind of content they want on their sites.”

    Continuing, Maher claimed, “But it also means that it is a little bit tricky to really address some of the real challenges of where does bad information come from, and sort of the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

    Then, in an August of 2021 Ted Talk, Maher attacked the idea of “truth,” telling the audience, “In our normal lives, these contentious conversations tend to erupt over a disagreement about what the truth actually is. But the people who write these [Wikipedia] articles, they’re not focused on the truth. They’re focused on something else, which is the best of what we can know right now.”

    Continuing, Maher claimed, “That perhaps, for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

    Watch Maher’s comments to the Atlantic Council here:

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    In any case, Elon, who responded to numerous posts about Maher, declared that he would be funding a nationwide signature campaign meant to show support for the First Amendment. Posting about it on X, he said, “Given the relentless attacks on free speech, I am going to fund a national signature campaign in support of the First Amendment.”

    In one of his posts on X about Maher, Elon called her one of the “worst human beings” in the country, saying, “Katherine Maher is blatantly racist and sexist – one of the worst human beings in America.” That came in response to a post saying, “Current CEO of NPR Katherine Maher in 2021, back when she worked for Wikipedia, literally talking about rewriting history because it currently favors white people.”

    Watch that video here: