The odds are that Musk will succeed, at least to some extent. But if he does, it will do much more than improve Twitter. He'll have become the great peacemaker, preventing, for the time being, war between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley.
Republicans and Democrats alike are spoiling to foist the heavy regulatory hand of the state on social media’s irresponsible speech restrictions, either through imposing federal rules or forcing the massive tech companies to split into pieces. Musk may defuse what would be a First Amendment disaster.
As powerful as monster firms such as Facebook and Google have become, they’re still private businesses; no one has to agree to, for example, Instagram’s terms of service and become a member. Life can actually be lived without these cyberspace platforms, most of which didn’t exist a generation ago.
As outrageous as Twitter’s ideologically driven ban of Trump was, it’s tantamount to a prominent newspaper deciding not to run an elected leader’s op-ed column or letter to the editor. For the government to require that private electronic venues not exercise censorship of ideas, as disgracefully unhealthy for public discourse as that policy may be, is for it to trample on private property rights in an era when private ownership has never been under greater attack from ever-expanding government.
Compare what social media firms do with a private citizen or business loaning or renting someone a pen and paper or a bullhorn or a computer. If he decides to take back his property because he doesn’t like what his client is using his property to write or say, can that really be construed as a violation of the Constitution? Or say you let people take to a soapbox on your land, with cameras transmitting the content far and wide; would you be trampling the First Amendment if you showed someone off the acreage that you own because you found their expressed opinions to be odious?
Obviously not. But the Supreme Court has declared the internet to be a public square.
But thinking of the internet as tantamount to a physical place is misleading. It’s actually the mass exchanging of computer code via the transmission of electronic pulses through fiber optic cable and wi-fi radio waves. The interconnection of computer networks utilizing billions of various devices shouldn’t be considered an invisible Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner any more than the use of billions of radios and televisions in the delivery of free speech warranted treating the airwaves as a physical forum of opinion exchange.
It bears mentioning that had the British government, before the age of radio, shut down the famed forum convening weekly at the physical Hyde Park location, it wouldn’t have precluded the public’s free exercise of speech via numerous other avenues or turned Britain into the Soviet Union.
From the point of view of the computer user, the internet is the same as a gargantuan hard drive and mega modem in one, where access to information, images, products available for purchase, and communication with others are all at one’s fingertips. In reality, that user is relying on the cooperation of others, many of them located far away. The internet is really a global free market.
“A rule compelling the critic of official conduct to guarantee the truth of all his factual assertions ... leads to a comparable ‘self-censorship,’” he said.
Brennan noted that such a government rule “dampens the vigor and limits the variety of public debate.” Today, instead of a critic, whether a media outlet or an individual citizen, fearing a libel suit, he fears being canceled by social media platforms, and he may self-censor to avoid that.
Private property rights pitted against free speech rights, with the federal government poised to interfere in both areas, is a predicament in which the American people should never have found themselves. Elon Musk changing Twitter from the inside may only delay a conflict that, no matter which side wins, ends with free citizens losing.
