Redditors in Waterloo region join online protest against Elon Musk by blocking links to X

Some Redditors from Waterloo region are joining a new protest sweeping across the social media platform. Moderators are choosing to block links from the website X, which was formerly called Twitter.

This protest is in response to Elon Musk's behaviour at U.S. President Donald Trump's inaugural event last week. Musk, the owner of X, appeared to make a fascist salute during a speech to the crowd.

Walter Schultz is one of the moderators of the Waterloo subreddit, where he goes by the handle Neoengel. The subreddit has over 74,000 members and it no longer allows any links from X or Facebook.

"[X] has become increasingly unusable as well as getting more and more obnoxious as the time goes on with the new owner," Schultz said.

"The other reason, of course, is the incident that took place with the offensive hand gesture. What I saw were other Reddits saying, 'No, we're not going to do that. We're going to start banning [links from X].'"

He added that they decided to also ban Facebook links because of Meta's decision to change its hateful conduct policy in a way that some advocates say makes it easier to target women and 2SLGBTQ+ people.

Elon Musk accused of making what appeared to be fascist salute at Trump inaugural event

9 days ago

Duration 0:33

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took the stage at an inaugural event for U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday, pumping his fists and then making what some critics said appeared to be a fascist salute as he thanked the crowd. Some supporters are dismissing those claims, saying that Musk was merely gesturing 'from my heart to you.' Musk was tapped by Trump to co-lead an advisory group aimed at carrying out dramatic cuts to the U.S. government, dubbed DOGE.

Schultz said others were eager to join the protest when he suggested the idea of blocking links from X with his fellow moderators.

"What we're seeing is something that unifies us on a platform that currently appears to offer the ability to express ourselves with less risk of retaliation for valid criticism," he said.

"Reasonable people have justifiably had enough."

Potential impact

Shana MacDonald is an associate professor of communication arts and the O'Donovan Chair in Communication at the University of Waterloo. She says the protest may not change much when it comes to X's policies or revenue — but it can have impacts in other ways.

"It's showing that users do actually have a lot of power when it comes to how they use apps and which apps they choose to engage in," she said.

"It's demonstrating that you can collectively come together and decide what you are going to accept, what is okay and what is not okay."

She says in addition to the controversial hand gesture, Musk's decision to change content moderation policies on X have also brought up concerns among internet users.

"There is an absolute lack of content moderation, which means the proliferation of hate and hate speech and misinformation. I think social media users are beginning to feel that they have mechanisms in place to stop the flow of these very harmful kinds of conversations."

MacDonald also addressed concerns that banning links could be hampering freedom of expression.

"I think it's really important when we're talking about freedom of expression, to really think about a harm-to-risk ratio. In a place like X right now with the lack of content moderation... it's actually really detrimental to targeted communities who are seeing the consequences of it with offline and in real life violence," she said.

"When we have that conversation around freedom of expression and censorship, we always have to ask within the context of an ethical commitment to not spread hate."