But as Elon Musk hammers out X’s speech policies in real time, nearly two years after buying the company, it’s worth drawing a bright red line where world leaders are concerned. As Donald Trump began to surge in 2015, social media companies faced more and more pressure to suppress his posts. This obviously intensified after 6 January, when Meta and Twitter banned the sitting president.

Before, though, Meta and X held to a policy of making specific speech exceptions for world leaders. “After Trump was elected, Facebook and Twitter came out with their policies on posts that they saw as ‘newsworthy’ or of ‘public interest’ — which was pretty much anything the president of the United States (or other world leaders) said on their platforms,” reported Vox reported in 2021. “In October 2019, Twitter again laid out its policies regarding world leaders, including what content was still subject to their terms of service — that is, the exemptions to the world leader exemptions.”

After Trump’s ban, Vox named Jair Bolsonaro and Khamenei as figures who could also face bans. (Khamenei eventually did in the pre-Musk era.) Musk himself discussed Khamenei’s use of the platform on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “We do have a kind of UN exclusion rule,” he explained last year. “You can have, say, the ayatollah who would prefer that Israel not exist, but he’s allowed to go to the UN building in New York. Generally, officials from Iran do go to the UN building, even though they’re a heavily sanctioned country. Similarly, you do want to have the leaders of countries represented on social media. You want to hear what they have to say, even if what they say is terrible.”

This is the correct position. Banning Khamenei is well within Musk’s right as the owner of a private platform, but tech executives should not be making determinations about what world leaders can or cannot say. Musk himself is a great example: he’s a US government contractor whose Starlink product is an important asset in geopolitical conflicts, including the one between Israel and Iran.

Government officials and tech executives should trust users to sort these questions out on their own without the heavy hand of suppression. They’re just as smart as the people in Washington and Palo Alto, where leaders should understand that exposing people to the horrible takes of figures like Khamenei is actually what makes it harder for evil people to play victim. If Musk weighed in after Khamenei’s account was suspended to reverse the call, he was right to do it.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington D.C. Correspondent.

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