Elon Musk announced that he will pay legal fees for anyone unfairly treated by their employer due to their activity on his social media platform, X, formerly known as Twitter.
“If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill,” Musk posted. “No limit. Please let us know,” he added.
Almost instantly, users flooded the comments of the post, sharing their personal experiences and even court filings against former employers. Musk later insisted that he and his team “won’t just sue, it will be extremely loud and we will go after the boards of directors of the companies too.”
Musk’s announcement follows NASCAR’s decision to indefinitely suspend driver Noah Gragson after learning that he liked an “insensitive meme,” according to the Associated Press, that depicted an image of George Floyd.
After Musk vowed to cover legal fees, several other X users claimed to have been unfairly reprimanded at work or even fired from their job for simply following a conservative account or liking a conservative post. Kara Lynne, who works as a customer relations manager for comic book company said that her personal witch hunt “was led by someone who dug through my tweets and found a single one from 2016 regarding hesitation of people taking advantage of the bathroom discussion . . . I was fired the same day.”
Responses to the announcement were overwhelmingly positive, several X users claimed that Musk “is now a true free speech hero.” Some users even considered “dropping anonymity,” stating “[i]f X protects its users and creators, then many more will be emboldened to share their voices on this platform.”
Last week, X filed a lawsuit against Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization, alleging that CCDH unlawfully “gained access to protected X Corp. data,” in order to “cherry-pick from hundreds of millions of posts made each day on X and falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content.” The lawsuit then states that this information was enlisted in a “scare campaign” with the intention of “driv[ing] away advertisers from the X platform.”
The lawsuit claims that CCDH is an activist organization “masquerading” as a research agency, “funded and supported by unknown organizations, individuals and potentially even foreign governments with ties to legacy media companies.”
Additionally, the suit alleges that CCDH violated its terms of agreement with X Corp. and “convinced an unknown third party – in violation of that third party’s contractual obligations – – to improperly share login credentials to a secured database that CCDH then accessed, and retrieved information from, on multiple occasions without authorization.”
