Break Up Social Media Monopolies to Protect Free Speech

Donald Trump is preparing to unleash the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission as antitrust warriors against the tech giants. And good on him. Breaking up the monopolies on speech might save us—particularly anyone right-of-center—from encroaching online deplatforming, and preserve our ability to hear ideas outside echo chambers of bullied consensus.

The First Amendment doesn’t restrain censorship by private social media companies. Thus have progressives today reveled in their newfound power to enforce their own opinions through deplatforming. That only works because the platforms matter as near-monopolies; no one cares who gets kicked off MySpace. If you end the monopolies, you defang deplatforming.

For much of American history, the media published things—on paper, then on radio, movies, TV, art shows, the Internet, and so on—and the First Amendment protected them. That covered both nice thoughts you and your grandma agreed with and vile thoughts from ideologies your grandpa fought against. As in “I disagree with what you say, but will fight for your right to defend it.”

Then social media hit some kind of cultural saturation point around the 2016 election. People couldn’t produce and consume enough opinion, and even traditional media dumped old-timey reporting in favor of doing stories based on what others posted online. It was a mighty climax for the Great Experiment in Free Speech—no filters, no barriers, a global audience up for grabs. Say something interesting and you went viral, your thoughts forever alongside Edward R. Murrow’s, Rachael Maddow’s, and the candidate herself.

Then, with the election of Donald Trump and backlash against his speech, some began not just to tolerate but to demand censorship. First they came for Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik, and few shed a tear. Free speech had become weaponized, critics opined, complaining that it just wasn’t right that platforms like YouTube could put Alex Jones’s thoughts alongside those of “established” journalists. When Twitter initially dragged its feet in banning Jones, a “journalist” from CNN helpfully dug through Jones’s tweets to find examples of where he’d broken the rules.