Kamala Harris vs. Elon Musk
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 t
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