Elon Musk Saves Free Speech. Again. Will Ireland Forgive Him?

Seems like a good question, since large parts of America have yet to forgive Elon Musk for saving free speech here. Whatever Musk’s other peccadilloes may be, he spent $44 billion of his own money to buy Twitter outright and immediately exposed how government pressured the platform to shut down dissent and debate during the Biden years. Musk uncovered the whole corrupt Big Brother-Big Tech Censorship Industrial Complex run out of the Departments of State and Health and Human Services and the abuse of “misinformation” to mean “anything that contradicts our positions.”

What’s he gotten for that effort? Three years of abuse, which has peaked in the DOGE era — although it’s only gotten more risible too:

Tiktoker says that the spells witches are trying to cast on President Trump aren’t working, and they should instead target Elon Musk Seems totally normal and stable

— Libs of TikTok(@#LibsofTikTok) Mar 11, 2025

Yeah … go with that.

Anyway, the Daily Wire revealed that Musk hasn’t abandoned the cause of free speech and government intimidation toward independent media platforms. This time, Musk intervened to save Gript, an independent, conservative, pro-life platform in Ireland, which reported on a grassroots demonstration against the government’s immigration and placement policies. The Irish government tried to force Twitter/X to secretly cough up Gript’s data, in an apparent attempt to retaliate for critical coverage of the policies.

Musk’s X told the Irish government to pound sand, and notified Gript of the attempt in defiance of the order:

Elon Musk’s social media platform X is being hailed in Ireland for its defense of the free press after it declined to comply with a demand from Irish authorities for confidential user data from one of the nation’s only independent news outlets.

An Irish court order, issued on June 13, 2024, and obtained by The Daily Wire, sought not only private account details, but also a log of IP addresses and messages tied to the Gript Media’s coverage of the April protests against the forced housing of undocumented migrants by the Irish government.

The order, granted under Ireland’s Criminal Justice Act 1994 at the request of Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police, directed X to produce extensive data linked to Gript Media’s official X account, @griptmedia. The court order specifically sought subscriber and registration details, including all logged IP addresses, private messages that would have exposed confidential informants, attachments, and posted videos from April 25-28, 2024.

I’ve had a number of interactions with Gript, mainly in relation to their coverage of Irish politics, but also to offer my analyses of American political developments as well. The mainstream media in Ireland is even more relentlessly one-note than it is in the US, which makes Gript not just a necessity but also an easy target for bureaucrats and authoritarians. 

This is what triggered the effort to intimidate Gript:

In April, Gript extensively covered protests in Newtownmountkennedy, where Irish citizens opposed the establishment of an “asylum seeker” accommodation center. The demonstrations escalated on April 25, with the Garda Public Order Unit using force, including pepper spray, against protesters. Gript’s journalist Fatima Gunning was caught in the clashes, an incident captured on video and widely circulated online.

According to court documents obtained by The Daily Wire, it was shortly after the publication of these videos that the Gardaí sought legal authority to access Gript’s X account, a move seen by journalists as an attempt to intimidate those seeking to expose state misconduct.

Previous Twitter ownership/management would have rolled over for this kind of order. Until very recently, so would other American tech platforms. The only reason that some of them might defy such an order is because Musk took all of the risk up front to protect Twitter/X users from Big Brother censors here in the US as well as in Europe, and forced his competitors to adopt the same policy as a market response to angry user bases. 

So now the Irish know that their government is trying to silence independent journalists. Will this really result in Musk and X being “hailed in Ireland” on a widespread basis? As someone who has observed Irish politics for quite some time, I’d wager on hardly. The center of Irish politics is somewhere between Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders in the US, and now with a hearty dash of anti-Semitism emerging in its foreign policy. The major parties in Ireland are a few flavors of the same thing, with hard-Left Sinn Féin tossed in as a political bete noire to get them to combine even more tightly in favor of the establishment and status quo. Conservo-populism exists in Ireland, but not enough to break through in organized politics — at least yet, although the immigration issue may very well change that calculus soon. 

That’s why the government wanted to intimidate Gript. That’s why all governments like to censor — to maintain their power in the status quo. Musk and Twitter/X disrupts that monopoly where it forms, but that’s proven mainly a thankless task, even in the land of the free. Unfortunately.