Elon Musk's Nobel Peace Prize Nomination Is Absurd | Opinion

European Parliament member Branko Grims recently proposed billionaire Elon Musk's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, citing his "consistent support" for freedom of speech. Musk bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, supposedly to liberate it from a left-wing censorship regime and foster "a common digital town square."

Musk is by no means a shoo-in. Each year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee receives hundreds of nominations for the distinction, and Musk was nominated in 2024, to no avail, on similar grounds.

What's more, Musk isn't the free speech champion Grims, Musk, and his acolytes say he is. Under his stewardship, X has outright censored speech and otherwise distorted the open exchange of ideas.

Musk's efforts to reform X were informed in part by the previous administration's failings—notably, its censorship of the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop contents. Weeks before the 2020 election, Twitter froze the Post's account and blocked the story—mistakenly suspecting it contained "hacked materials"—before uncensoring it after a day and reinstating the account two weeks later.

Musk rightfully condemned the episode as "free speech suppression," but X has also censored journalism under dubious standards.

In September 2024, when Ken Klippenstein published the Trump campaign's vetting dossier on JD Vance, X blocked the link and banned him for "doxxing" (the document contained private information, which Klippenstein subsequently redacted). When The New York Times revealed 15 days later the story was tanked after Trump's campaign "connected" with X to do so, Musk suddenly saw the light, shortly thereafter reviving Klippenstein's account on "free speech principles."

This episode isn't the only time X's anti-"doxxing" policy has stifled journalism.

Soon after taking over the platform, Musk fleshed out X's doxxing rules during his war against ElonJet, an account that shared publicly accessible information about his jet's real-time whereabouts. In December 2022, violating his pledge not to remove ElonJet, X made a slipshod, ambiguous policy change, banning the account and temporarily suspending reporters who covered it. Last month, a Spectator article was censored for reporting, based on public information, that X user "Adrian Dittman" (previously rumored to be Musk's alternate account) was indeed just a man named Adrian Dittman.

X's doxxing rules have been inconsistently applied. When Musk broadcast Mark Zuckerberg's publicly available address, he said it didn't constitute doxxing. Nor does linking to Hunter Biden laptop documents, noted journalist Lee Fang. LibsOfTikTok, an account Musk often boosts and that subjects unsuspecting, often LGBTQ TikTok users to abuse, has seemingly run afoul of the policy unpunished.

X has also been roundly criticized for acceding to foreign governments' censorship requests—at a greater rate than Twitter 1.0. And Musk's record of throttling links to competitors and his admission to suppressing tweets that link to outside websites to stop "lazy linking" give the impression of the platform putting user retention over the free flow of information.

X's algorithm further distorts debate by prioritizing users who pay for verification badges. While pitched as a less elitist alternative to Twitter's prior system, it's amplified purveyors of content that'd presumably fall by the wayside in a fairer marketplace of ideas. Musk has been accused of wielding X's verification system capriciously. Users he's squabbled with over visa policy and video games have had their verification badges revoked. Musk, for his part, attributes his critics' suppression to the algorithm maximizing "unregretted user-seconds."

If X is a public square, paying members possess virtual bullhorns, and Musk alone has a sort of P.A. system. When his tweet during the 2023 Super Bowl underperformed, he reportedly had his account algorithmically boosted "by a factor of 1,000." This was dialed back, but to this day users lament Musk's outsize presence on their feeds. A Fortune analysis detailed how users are force-fed Musk's posts "whether they want it or not." According to research by media scholars Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic, after Musk endorsed Trump in July, his account saw "a statistically anomalous boost in engagement," raising the possibility that he "tweaked the platform's algorithm to increase the reach of his posts."

All this is to say little of X restricting the word cisgender, Musk's censorial litigation, his threat to suspend users for posting "euphemisms" that "imply genocide" (which by his reckoning include "from the river to the sea" and "decolonization"), and, most recently, his claim that it's a "crime" to post the names of the engineers currently helping him seize U.S. government infrastructure via the Trump administration's "Department of Government Efficiency."

Suffice it to say, the reasoning behind Branko Grims' pick for the Nobel Peace Prize stacks up poorly against the mountain of evidence surveyed, however inexhaustively, above. It'd be astounding if the judges on the Nobel Committee bought it. It's risible enough that some in the court of public opinion still do.

Robert McCoy is a writer whose articles have appeared in The New Republic, The Daily Beast, The Progressive, and elsewhere.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.