Elon Musk’s social media company X (formerly Twitter) has the “legal standing” to challenge Ireland’s hate speech legislation and the company will help finance any legal challenges filed by Irish citizens against the law if it is enacted, the billionaire businessman said.
Mr. Musk made the remarks during a discussion with Ben Scallan, the senior political correspondent at the Irish news publication Gript, on X Spaces on Jan. 23.
The businessman went on to state that X has legal standing in Ireland to challenge the hate-speech bill because the social-media company has its main European headquarters there, and also has “a big presence” in Ireland.
“We’ll also fund the legal fees of Irish citizens that want to challenge the bill as well,” he continued. “We’ll make sure that if there’s an attempt to suppress the voice of the Irish people, that we do our absolute best to defend the people of Ireland and their ability to speak their mind.”
What’s Included in the Bill
The measure, put forward by the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, would repeal the current Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989 and replace it with provisions that harshly criminalize various hate crimes.
It would also expand protections in cases of “incitement to violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of certain characteristics,” such as race, gender, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, or disability.
The bill would also make “publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,” an offense.
Opponents of the measure, including Ireland’s Department of Justice have said the measure is aimed at “protecting those who are most vulnerable to hate crime and hate speech.”
However, critics, including an organization called Free Speech Ireland, have noted the bill is vague and does not explicitly define “hatred,” referring to it instead as “hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.”
Free Speech Implications
They also fear the measure will impinge upon freedom of expression protections under both the Irish constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.Speaking to Gript, businessman Mr. Musk said that free speech is the “bedrock of democracy” and said he is concerned about any kind of law that features terminology “that could fit in a George Orwell novel.”
“These bills will generally be named in ways that sound innocuous and sound like ’sure why wouldn’t anyone support that' but when you look at the details, its the opposite of what the title is or is disingenuous,” he said.
Mr. Musk, a self-described free speech advocate, said Irish citizens should be concerned about the government being given broad powers to define what hate speech is.
This, he said, could lead to hate speech effectively being defined as anything that does not support the ruling party.
“It’s so extreme that you could be put in prison for putting the wrong meme on your phone, and that’s insane,” the businessman said.
