In the past, “people who did completely legal stuff were cut off from banks,” notes Riana Pfefferkorn, a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. There are incentives to overenforce boundaries around questionable images — and traditionally, that’s what the financial industry has done. So why is X different? It’s run by Elon Musk. “He’s the richest man in the world, he has close ties to the US government, and he’s incredibly litigious,” says Pfefferkorn. In fact, Musk has previously filed suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate; in a now-dismissed lawsuit, he claimed it illegally collected data showing an increase in hate speech after he bought the platform formerly known as Twitter
