Let Twitter be

do we really want a democrat-dominated FCC governing social media?

The Reason Foundation hates ‘em, but still makes a strong argument against bringing in the government to control the social media giants. Let’s hope that Elon Musk’s follows through on his hint that he might start up a rival; Trump’s effort appears to have failed but then, Trump and his crew aren’t Elon Musk. And in fact, some commentators have pointed out that Musk could just buy Twitter, est. value $22 billion — pocket change for Elon, rather than start up a competing forum. Great idea: you’d hear liberal heads exploding around the globe.

The last thing anyone who cares about free speech should want are politicians and government bureaucrats deciding what can and cannot be on social media platforms. Bureaucrats and regulators would be worse at finding an appropriate balance of content moderation than private firms, and their mistakes would likely apply to all platforms. The right doesn’t want people chosen by President Joe Biden regulating all social media platforms and the left doesn’t want people chosen by former President Donald Trump choosing what social media content is and isn’t acceptable. And none of us want content rules that change whenever the political party in power changes.

Like any private business, social media platforms are based on mutually beneficial exchanges where both business and customers benefit. If either the business or a customer does not feel they’ll benefit from the exchange, they have the right to walk away. Just as we can all decide we don’t want to use a company’s services, that company can also decide it doesn’t want to provide us services. A Christian baker has the right to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. And any customers who don’t like the baker’s decisions are free to take their business elsewhere.

Indeed our own organization, Reason Foundation, has had some of its news and analysis content wrongly flagged by social media platforms. While we certainly disagreed with the platforms, we entirely support their rights to choose what goes on and is shared on their platforms. And, yes, companies like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have developed great influence in our society, but social media companies aren’t the government. They aren’t required by the Constitution to let us speak on their platforms.

These companies face a complex task trying to figure out what customers want, how to provide it, and how to make a profit. They certainly get things wrong, as in the case of Twitter’s Babylon Bee suspension. But the gloomy alternative is the government regulating speech, which would also produce a chilling effect whereby social media companies would likely forgo any kind of controversial content to avoid regulatory sanction.  This would be a tragedy given the diversity of conversations occurring on the internet.

Beyond pleasing customers and making a profit, it is also a private business’s First Amendment right to promote whatever speech it wants to. In 1974, the Supreme Court struck down a “right of reply” law that forced newspapers to publish the response of political candidates whose records they wrote about. The law would have forced private newspapers to print speech against their will.

Similarly, in 1995, the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring a private parade to include a gay rights group because it violated “the fundamental First Amendment rule that a speaker has the autonomy to choose the content of his own message.”

Whether it is a parade, a tweet, or a Facebook post, the constitutional principle is that users have no right to force platform providers to host their speech. Rather than calling for government regulation forcing social media companies to do what politicians or certain groups want, media consumers should develop skills at evaluating the merits of information we see online and making good decisions about what social media platforms and news sources we can trust. It is up to us to determine where we go to read, view, and learn things we don’t already know and we’re free to choose which news sites and social media platforms we want to be customers of.