Musk’s X: new rules, old problems

Musk reinstated Trump’s account in November 2022 after a poll, followed by many accounts suspended under the old regime. [1] He expanded Community Notes, a crowd-sourced fact-check system whose notes appear only when raters who usually disagree both find them helpful. [2]

In April 2023 X stated its policy plainly: posts that break rules but are not removed may have their reach limited, with labels on some. [3] That is visibility filtering, the practice Weiss exposed in Part 2, now acknowledged rather than hidden. X’s transparency reports show it continued to remove, label and limit large volumes of content and accounts. [4]

The honest summary is not “X stopped moderating.” X changed what it moderates, disclosed more about how, and kept the core tools.

In December 2022 X suspended several journalists who had reported on @ElonJet, which tracked Musk’s plane from public data, after a sudden change to its location policy. Most were restored after an outcry. [1] In August 2023 the Times documented X delaying links to the Times, Reuters, Substack and rival platforms; X reversed the delays for news outlets. [2]

In September 2024 X blocked links to a hacked Trump-campaign research file on JD Vance and suspended journalist Ken Klippenstein, who posted it, citing private information in the document. [3][4] The rationale echoes Twitter’s 2020 hacked-materials policy that the first Files thread condemned. [5] Klippenstein was reinstated in October.

These episodes do not show a hidden algorithm, but they are concrete. When the owner’s interests were at stake, X used the same tools the Files criticized.

Before Turkey’s May 2023 election, X restricted accounts and posts under court orders while objecting. Musk said the alternative was being throttled entirely. [1] In Brazil, X defied Justice Moraes’s orders in 2024 and was blocked nationwide from August 30 until October 8. It then complied, appointed a legal representative and paid fines. [2] The Brazil Files had framed Moraes as a censor. [3]

X’s own Turkey reports show high compliance with government removal requests. [4] Reports in September 2026 described X complying with most of a new wave of Turkish blocking orders, more than 1,270 accounts in a month. [5]

Complying with local law under threat of a nationwide ban is a hard trade-off that every platform faces. It is still government-ordered removal of speech, the thing the Files condemned when the U.S. government merely asked.

On December 5, 2025 the European Commission fined X €120 million, its first penalty under the Digital Services Act, for a deceptive paid “verified” checkmark, an inadequate ad repository and blocking researchers’ data access. [1][2] The fine was not for refusing to censor. House Judiciary Republicans still called DSA enforcement a global censorship regime in a February 2026 report. [3]

In February 2026 Paris prosecutors searched X’s French office in a probe that began over alleged algorithm manipulation and expanded after Grok produced sexualized deepfakes and other illegal content. The UK opened its own Grok inquiry. [4][5] Musk did not appear for an April 20 summons, and in May the matter became a criminal investigation. [6]

On shadowbans, a 2026 CHI audit of active accounts found X’s search and reply bans rare but structured, driven by opaque account and content signals. [7] A Dutch court held that X must give users specific reasons when it limits their visibility. [8] There is no published evidence that X secretly targets a political side, and no audit has ruled it out.