The dispute is based on around ten words, out of the 45 that make up the First Amendment to the United States Constitution – those which provide that “Congress shall pass no law (…) to limit freedom of expression ». They have guaranteed this fundamental freedom since 1791, with freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and the right to petition the government. In times of political and religious absolutism, these few words made the young Republic one of the freest in the world.
This freedom of expression, which is constitutive of American identity, has nevertheless become the backdrop for a fierce battle in which ideology, economic interests, accusations of manipulation, questioning of traditional media and the exponential rise of disinformation combine. This is how, on the eve of Donald Trump’s swearing-in on January 20, two billionaires who own powerful social networks, Elon Musk for X (formerly Twitter) and Mark Zuckerberg for Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and with them the Republican Party, pose as intractable defenders of freedom of expression and slayers of « censorship » coming from a progressivism presented as misguided which would, according to them, want to corset it.
When he took over Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, presented himself as a “absolutist of freedom of expression”. The free speech can it really be absolute, when “obscenity”incitement to violence or to commit illegal acts, among others, are not protected by the Constitution? In 2022, this radical reading of the First Amendment was embodied by a herald less flamboyant than Elon Musk in the person of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Taken to court by parents of victims for having denied on his website the mass massacre perpetrated in 2012 at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut (he had assured that it was a set-up stage to obtain greater gun control), he had appeared in court with a gag on which was written “save freedom of expression”.
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