On April 25, Elon Musk reached an agreement with Twitter’s board of directors to acquire and take the company private. He has pledged to pivot the platform toward respect for free speech principles, so that Twitter is “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive.” Less noticed, a few days earlier, on April 21, former community organizer-turned-president Barack Obama addressed an audience at Stanford University. In a slick presentation, he challenged the relevance—the very worth—of “free speech” by most people… The First Amendment is not the issue. Twitter’s carte blanche to act as “thought police,” even in its own realm, is the result of special exemptions from common-law legal liability granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, federal legislation that preempted a patch quilt of state tort laws…. But we live in an age of Orwellian dominant platforms, artificial intelligence, and mobile surveillance. The government has, in effect, licensed the private sector to censor political speech. Section 230 is the origin….
