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When Laura Loomer, a far-right activist, regained control of her Twitter account in late 2022, she knew whom to praise for her reinstatement.
“Thank you, Elon!” she wrote to Elon Musk, who had recently bought the social network. In another post, Ms. Loomer, who had been booted from the platform in 2018 for writing an anti-Muslim message, complimented Mr. Musk’s commitment to “free speech.”
Ms. Loomer is now sharing a different message about Mr. Musk. She and a prominent group of right-wing figures — many of whom have enjoyed more visibility on the platform, renamed X — are increasingly raising alarms about Mr. Musk’s influence over President-elect Donald J. Trump and what they characterize as his willingness to silence critics on his social network.
Apart from Ms. Loomer, high-profile conservatives including Charlie Kirk and Stephen K. Bannon have started speaking out against Mr. Musk or his policy positions. Batya Ungar-Sargon, the conservative opinion editor of Newsweek, recently called Mr. Musk a “shill” who censors opponents. Mike Davis, a lawyer close to Mr. Trump, told Mr. Musk on social media to “stay in your lane.”
Their criticism followed X’s moves to suspend or otherwise restrict dozens of accounts that raised concerns about Mr. Musk and blocked links to articles about him, citing violations of its terms of service. Over the weekend, Mr. Musk drew further ire from conservatives for using his X account to attack Nigel Farage, an ally of Mr. Trump and the head of Britain’s far-right Reform UK party.
Mr. Musk, 53, has rapidly vaporized some of the good will he built with Mr. Trump’s supporters after campaigning heavily for the Republican presidential candidate last year. Some right-wing personalities who championed Mr. Musk’s foray into Republican politics now say they feel deceived and worry that their agenda may be eclipsed by his own.
The split raises questions about whether the billionaire and right-wing Trump supporters are allies of convenience. In some ways, Mr. Musk has become a target of the principles he has championed on X by allowing Ms. Loomer and others who were barred from the platform to return.
“Speech suppression on Elon Musk’s X is nothing new, and the claims of ‘free speech absolutism’ were always performative,” said Evelyn Douek, a Stanford Law School professor who studies the regulation of online speech. “It’s especially poetic that these charges are coming from someone like Loomer, whose account reinstatement was supposedly emblematic of the dawn of a new era on Twitter.”
Ms. Loomer, a two-time Republican congressional candidate who has described Islam as a “cancer,” broke from Mr. Musk a few days before Christmas after posting on X about her unhappiness with Sriram Krishnan, an Indian American venture capitalist whom Mr. Trump picked to advise on artificial intelligence. She said Mr. Krishnan supported expanding the use of H-1B visas to bring skilled foreign workers to U.S. companies, which she decried.
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