A few weeks after being legally rejected by his transgender daughter, Elon Musk slammed Twitter this week for going “too far” in suspending the account of controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, who deadnamed and insulted transgender actor Elliot Page.
Musk, the potential future owner of Twitter, agreed with someone else’s tweet, which suggested that the platform was wrong to suspend Peterson’s account over his June 22 tweet about Page.
“Yeah, they’re going way too far in squashing dissenting opinions,” Musk replied on Monday, after he was asked about the right-wing internet personality being “banned from the bird app.”
(Philip Pacheco/AFP/Getty Images)
The next day, Twitter came under fire for letting Page’s former name — what the “Juno” star was known by before his transition, become a top trending topic. BuzzFeed News reported that Twitter violated its own policy against hateful online content by letting the algorithmically-generated deadname stay in its Trends column.
The controversy over Page’s deadname grew in the wake of Peterson’s June 22 tweet. As Newsweek reported, the psychologist and former professor at the University of Toronto used Page’s deadname and she/her pronounces in a tweet that read: “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”
Once an obscure academic, Peterson became a hero in conservative circles for railing against feminism and social justice issues, and by inserting himself into the debate about transgender rights by refusing to refer to a student by their chosen pronouns, according to Vox.
News of Peterson’s suspension, and his refusal to remove his tweet about Page, began circulating online. The news also was amplified by Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila Fuller, and by YouTube talk show host David Rubin and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
On Tuesday, Shapiro alerted his 4.4 million Twitter followers to the news that Rubin also had been suspended in late June. In a series of tweets, Shapiro also criticized how people appear to be penalized online or elsewhere in society if they ever refer to the name a transgender person used before transitioning.
Shapiro said it’s wrong that “we are not allowed to mention that until five minutes ago, Elliott Page, who is very very very male, was a female actress named Ellen Page.”
Shapiro shared a message Rubin wrote, in which “The Rubin Report” host railed against the “woke activists” running Twitter. Rubin also called on Musk to change Twitter’s policies if and when the Tesla CEO becomes the platform’s owner.
“While it is unclear how I broke their terms of service, it is clear that they are breaking their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders by letting a bunch of Woke activists run the company,” Rubin wrote. “I hope Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter goes through so he can blow up their servers and humanity can move past this pervasive, twisted, self-imposed mental institution.”
Mikhaila Fuller also expressed hope that Musk will change the platform’s rules when he takes over. “Definitely not a free speech platform at the moment @elonmusk,” Peterson’s daughter tweeted.
It’s not clear when Musk’s purchase of Twitter will go through, but the self-styled champion of free speech framed his interest in owning the platform as about protecting people’s First Amendment rights.
Musk has blasted the company’s rules against misinformation and other legal but harmful content. During a meeting with Twitter employees in June, Musk said that the platform should allow all legal speech, while agreeing that some content moderation is necessary to protect people from harassment NPR reported. Musk’s comments about loosening the rules for content moderation has raised concerns that, critics say, could open the floodgates to even more hate speech and misinformation, NPR reported.
Musk also has faced accusations that he has promoted hateful speech, including about transgender rights. Last month, it became known that the issue of transgender identity was an issue that was very close to him.
Musk’s 18-year-old transgender daughter expressed a desire to have nothing more to do with him, while successfully petitioning the Los Angeles County Superior Court to legally drop her father’s last name. She cited gender identity as the reason for the name change, while also saying she no longer wished “to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
It’s not known why Musk’s daughter wanted to legally distance herself from her father or whether it had to do with some of the controversial things the billionaire has said about trans issues.
While Musk tweeted in 2020 that he “absolutely support trans,” he also has said that “all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare.” Musk in 2020 also tweeted that “pronouns suck,” prompting the musician Grimes, his girlfriend at the time, to tell him to turn off his phone. “I cannot support hate,” Grimes wrote. “Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.”
