The far rights crusade against free speech appears to be continuing after Signal links seemingly got banned on X/Twitter.
The censorship spree of the far rights leadership in the US appears to be continuing. It continues the longstanding multi-year trend that says that anyone posting speech that the right disagrees with will not be tolerated and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
For us, that trend included Trumps call to jail reporters last October, Trump issuing a legal threat against the New York Times and Penguin Randomhouse over speech they didn’t like, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to dox Wikipedian’s for daring to post something they disagree with, Elon Musk and Jim Jordan weaponizing government to silence criticism, Trump silencing the Associated Press for daring to properly call it the “Gulf of Mexico”, and, most recently, Elon Musk reiterating calls to jail reporters for publishing content that hurts the Trump administrations feelings.
Today, we are learning that the censorial rampage of right wing extremists is continuing after Elon Musk’s personal megaphone, X/Twitter, began censoring links to Signal on the platform. From Bleeping Computers:
Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) is now blocking links to “Signal.me,” a URL used by the Signal encrypted messaging to share your account info with another person.
According to BleepingComputer’s tests and other users’ reports, attempting to post Signal.me links via public posts, direct messages, or profile bios receive error messages citing spam or malware risks.
“This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can’t complete this action right now. Please try again later,” reads an error shown when sending Signal.me links.
As shown by our tests below, only messages that specifically contain the URL “signal.me” are being blocked.
Journalist Matt Binder, who first reported on the issue, says it is unclear when this behavior started on the platform.
“It’s unclear when X blocked “Signal.me” links on the platform,” explains Binder in his writeup.
“However, it seems like a fairly recent change as users have previously been able to include “Signal.me” links in public posts and in their profile bio. Other Signal links, such as Signal.org, do not appear to be blocked.”
When I saw this, what popped into my mind is the question of whether this is just another early warning sign of things to come. After all, just look at the efforts to have government massively censor TikTok. Back in January (which really does feel like a lifetime ago at this point), the US Supreme Court ruled that mass government censorship of an entire platform does not violate the first amendment (which covers freedom of expression). There’s no debating that it was a horrible ruling, but a ruling that America is stuck with now. When that ruling took hold, there was an immediate push to start censoring other platforms. The debate, however, ended abruptly after Trumps executive order allowed TikTok to restore services shortly after.
Still, the precedent still sticks in that the American government can arbitrarily censor any online platform they damned well please and platforms can do exactly Jack all about it given that the US is no longer legally a safe haven for expression. As such, it’s entirely possible for the government to hold a sort of Sword of Damocles over any platform that does anything that the Trump administration doesn’t personally like. Make one misstep and the US government can just wipe your platform off the face of the American internet with a stroke of a pen. Given the Trump administration’s obsession of threatening or outright targeting anything that displeases him in the smallest way, it wouldn’t be a surprise if this sort of thing gets used as a weapon. At minimum, you can’t say at this point that this very scenario can’t happen.
While this latest move may seem comparatively small since no one in their right mind is daily driving X/Twitter for their social media presence anymore, I can’t help but be reminded that Musk is also one of the people (badly) running the US government at this point. It’s not that big of a leap at this stage to suggest that it’s entirely possible that there could be an effort to start using government to begin censoring whole platforms for the American population. The barriers to prevent that sort of scenario really are only minor speed bumps at this stage. I mean, seriously, what’s the barriers here? Time? Trump has plenty of that at this point.
At any rate, the situation in the US is already terrifying and it keeps finding ways of being even more worrying.
