What Elon Musk Doesn’t Know About Free Speech

These days, every debate about free speech and social media in America feels tendentious and dumb. But, unfortunately for everyone who would rather mute the words “First Amendment” from their lives than read another opinion column about free speech, a great number of Americans seem to believe that we have entered an era of unprecedented censoriousness. One reason that this conversation feels both stunted and endless is that the same people who feel the deepest paranoia that their speech is being impinged upon don’t exactly know how. Is Instagram hiding their posts? Have they been “shadow-banned” on Twitter? Is there a council of élites who determine which thoughts are acceptable and which ones are not?