Opinion

DAN GAINOR: We got Twitter/X as a platform 20 years ago and global censors still hate and fear it

Trump and Musk broke the social media censorship cartel, but the free speech battle isn't over

By Dan Gainor Fox News

Published July 11, 2026 7:00am EDT

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I’ve been online for more than 30 years. Sometime this July, my Twitter/X account turns 18. That means it’s old enough to vote. The site itself launched publicly 20 years ago, on July 15, 2006. In all, I’ve been online since before the World Wide Web was worldwide back in the 1990s. I’m still a fan of print, but the impact of social media is undeniable. What mankind is still wrestling with is whether that’s good or bad.

To be fair, it’s a lot of both. And that’s an unpredictability governments and lefty journalists hate. The Charlie Kirk assassination went viral unedited. We all saw it, and it was etched into our hearts forever. The same is true of the attacks on President Donald Trump, terrorism and the war in Ukraine. That level of unrestricted freedom is what governments around the world want to stop. If no one can tell what officials are doing, no one can stop them.

America came within a hair’s breadth of that freedom being taken away and censorship taking hold here — maybe everywhere. All the social media platforms were working together to control what we said online during the Biden years, working with foreign entities and so-called fact-checkers to censor more. Tesla founder Elon Musk and Trump stopped them. Musk bought Twitter, which broke the social media cartel, and Trump was reelected.

The censors and control freaks haven’t given up. There is too much power at stake for them ever to stop.

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It’s not all bleak, thankfully. Ordinary people — and even famous people — often go viral on Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram and........

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