Wouldn’t it be nice if more Americans had a principled understanding of “freedom of speech” that wasn’t influenced by the partisan priorities of the day?

Alas, we don’t live in such a dreamland. 

The seemingly bipartisan desire among politicians to regulate and micromanage what content is allowed on social media is possibly the most frustrating example of how little modern politics puts principle over partisanship. 

Those with some political ax to grind grew even more insufferable last week after Elon Musk announced he was going to release select “Twitter Files” — files that supposedly expose the political motivations behind high-profile cases of content moderation, such as Twitter’s decision to “censor” the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story from 2020. 

Populist conservative personalities were quick to portray such content moderation as an egregious violation of Twitter users’ constitutional rights. Fox News Host Tucker Carlson breathlessly exclaimed that Twitter’s decision to moderate political content was the largest First Amendment violation “in history” — a claim that is as historically ignorant as it is constitutionally illiterate. 

A social media platform’s decision to aggressively moderate politically disfavored content might be uncouth, illiberal or injurious to the overall concept of open discourse… but it’s not illegal. Nor should it be.

Twitter, after all, is a private company, and thus has the right to decide for itself what speech (political or otherwise) it will allow on its platform — a right that is protected by the very amendment to the United States Constitution conservatives like Carlson seem to believe was just violated. 

Such widespread misunderstandings about free speech, however, is likely more willful than incidental. Indeed, when it is politically profitable to do so, conservatives have vehemently insisted that private businesses face no legal obligation to “convey messages that conflict with [their] core beliefs” thanks to our enumerated right to free speech. 

As Christian Schneider pointed out at National Review Online, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz published a column using that very quote to defend a Colorado web designer who refused to build a custom website for a same-sex wedding. And yet, two days after that column ran, Cruz was on Fox News arguing that the U.S. Senate should “hold hearings and issue subpoenas” over Twitter’s content moderation practices — as if the social media giant wasn’t worthy of the same right to be free from government coercion as a religiously-conservative website designer in Colorado. 

It’s almost as if Ted Cruz’s understanding of the First Amendment might be more informed by what he finds to be politically profitable than any underlying jurisprudence. And he’s not alone. 

Conservative politicians, pundits and think tanks have all joined in the chorus calling for the government to regulate the moderation decisions of private tech companies — hardly the kind of political solution that comports with their supposed “limited government” approach to public policy. Constitutional illiteracy and doublethink regarding the principles of free speech, however, aren’t an exclusively conservative trait. 

The progressive meltdown over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was largely driven by fears on the Left that Twitter’s content moderation would not be aggressive enough moving forward. Indeed, even before the era of Musk, the far left had advocated intense crackdowns on “hate speech” and misinformation — even going so far as to advocate for government action against websites that weren’t censorious enough. Lawmakers in the state of New York even passed a law that requires websites to address “hateful conduct” on their platforms — a clearly unconstitutional requirement currently being challenged in court.   

The left’s apparent obsession with aggressively moderating online discourse is a stark departure from its traditional culture of free speech. Sure, supposed “hate speech” might be atrocious and abhorrent, and misinformation might very well be concerning to some aspects of public safety — but protecting such speech is central to the greater principles of an open and free society. 

Let’s not forget, after all, that the ACLU once took this value so seriously, it proudly defended the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois — not because the Nazi message is one worth hearing, but because the principle of free expression matters very little if it only applies to a narrow and “acceptable” set of ideas and perspectives.

Such principled defense of free speech, however, is becoming increasingly rare in modern politics — with progressives adopting the censorious “cancel culture” belief that hateful or false speech are somehow exempted from constitutional protections, and conservatives embracing big-government “solutions” to what they perceive as unfair practices by private companies. 

Even non-partisan allies of the First Amendment seem to have largely gone AWOL in recent years. The ACLU, for example, debated narrowing its defense of free speech to only those cases where progressive ideological preferences were at stake.      

Yes, the ongoing debate over online content moderation has exposed a profound constitutional illiteracy among Americans of all political persuasions. However, it also has laid bare just how little support there seems to be in our modern era for a fundamental belief in free speech — not to mention how willing pundits and partisan grifters are to intentionally misrepresent one of the most basic human rights enumerated in our nation’s founding documents. 

And that feels like a far greater threat to the future of open discourse than a few blue checkmarks being “shadowbanned” on some silly social media platform. 

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.