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The founder of defend, Jason Tanner, was listening to BBC Radio 4's Today programme in bed, early in 2025. He was jolted into action when he heard that Elon Musk, the wealthy owner of social media platform X, formerly Twitter, was commenting as an authority on tragic child gang rapes in the UK. This didn't quite add up with my knowledge of his expertise so out came the laptop and page after page of his platform was read...
The founder of defend, Jason Tanner, was listening to BBC Radio 4's Today programme in bed, early in 2025. He was jolted into action when he heard that Elon Musk, the wealthy owner of social media platform X, formerly Twitter, was commenting as an authority on tragic child gang rapes in the UK. This didn't quite add up with my knowledge of his expertise so out came the laptop and page after page of his platform was read...
The moment everything clicked
The moment everything clicked
After days of watching the same patterns repeat, Jason realised something fundamental:
the idea of “free speech” was being reshaped in front of our eyes.
Platforms claiming to defend it were using algorithms to decide who gets heard and who gets buried. Calls to shut down legacy media were being sold as liberation for the mass consumer, when in fact they reinforced power through communications control towards this platform and away from the established media, now labelled with a very loaded term - the legacy media..
People believed they were speaking freely. But their visibility — their very presence — depended on an algorithm they couldn’t see. Like Jason, they'd heard about algorithms and just assumed they were trendy new things. A touch of the Emperors New Clothes had descended on society, too busy to question or understand.
That was the moment the campaign took root. Not as a project, but as a responsibility.
Research & Evidence
Research & Evidence
Once Jason recognised the pattern, he began documenting it. Not as a researcher in a lab, but as someone watching a system behave in ways that didn’t match its promises.
The more he looked, the clearer the picture became.
Posts challenging dominant narratives were quietly suppressed. Accounts pushing divisive themes appeared in clusters, often created within days of each other. Racialised language spread rapidly, amplified by networks of profiles that behaved more like coordinated units than individuals.
It wasn’t chaos. It was choreography.
The myth of “the only place for free speech”
The myth of “the only place for free speech”
Jason got the sense that X , under Elon Musk, positioned itself as a last refuge of “real free speech.” It was a seductive message — simple, bold, and repeated endlessly. But the reality was far more controlled.
The platform wasn’t protecting free speech. It was curating it.
In November 2025, Jason published findings that added a new layer to the story. X’s own AI system, Grok, criticised Musk for failing to deploy existing technologies that could detect and remove bots — tools that have been available since 2018.
The implication was stark:
the platform had the ability to clean up its own manipulation, but chose not to.
Bots weren’t a flaw. They were part of the ecosystem.
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