The Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Elon Musk to lift a ban on X from disclosing who the federal government is surveilling on its platform.
X, formerly known as Twitter, attempted to publish a report in 2014 disclosing the number of government surveillance orders that it had received over a six-month period in 2013. The report was shared with the FBI for review, only for the federal agency to bar the company from publishing the document. The 9th Circuit upheld the restriction, saying that the relevant information was considered classified.
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X filed a request for the appeal in September. The court did not offer any reasons for why it rejected the social media platform’s request, nor did it say if any judges were interested in the case.
The desire to reveal what parties are surveilled through X’s platform is in line with the stated priorities of Musk, who has said that he favors free speech. The Tesla CEO said his purchase of the company in October 2022 was an effort toward protecting free speech online. He also allowed multiple journalists to publish the “Twitter Files,” a series of internal communications detailing how Twitter employees interacted with the FBI and how it regulated content on the platform.
