Nevertheless, our waning free speech culture obstructs the new age of information exchange. The great and good have greeted Musk s takeover by redoubling their call for Twitter and other avenues of exchange to prevent disinformation. While that sentiment has not been translated into law as it has in Europe, it nevertheless hobbles Twitter, as Musk recognizes. Not all information people provide is true, but a core idea supporting free expression is that the assessments of truth, particularly about policy and politics, are best made in a decentralized manner. Even if we cannot be confident the people will sift the wheat from the chaff, a premise of the First Amendment is they are more likely to do so than some centralized authority, given the biases of those who control that authority.
The mainstream media has emphasized the danger that Musk s takeover will lead to a disinformation dystopia. That stance is not surprising when one considers that Twitter is a competitor of established institutions.
Even though the First Amendment does not restrict private actors, the cultural concern about the danger of centralized authority does not disappear when an authority other than government makes the decisions in the form of content moderators. That danger becomes acute when Twitter or Facebook has substantial market power. Those who are banned from Twitter have few other avenues nearly as good to allow others to access their work on the internet. Consider this analogy: if elders of a small town four hundred years ago had enough power to persuade people to ostracize those with whom they disagree, free speech would not be effective even if the state did not formally censor. That example shows that the exchange of ideas requires not only favorable law, but a favorable culture, one in which people widely accept the dissemination of ideas they dislike and even consider to be false. In such a culture, there is confidence that truth will win out in the long run.
Musk faces a culture increasingly hostile to this view. The mainstream media in particular has emphasized the danger that Musk s takeover will lead to a disinformation dystopia as he changes Twitter s monitoring process. That stance is not surprising when one considers that Twitter is a competitor of established institutions. If Musk succeeds in making Twitter an ever better boulevard for free and decentralized expression, legacy journalism is at risk, because it will be easier to find better experts and more vibrant and original opinion. Twitter is an engine of disintermediation, and institutions resist disintermediation for existential reasons.
