WASHINGTON — Four years ago Elon Musk wrote the check and took Twitter. He said free speech is whatever the law allows, not whatever a room full of content reviewers decides is safe for the rest of us. The old system that quietly throttled posts and accounts that embarrassed the wrong people came apart. Banned users came back. The labels that used to bury certain stories disappeared. You can actually see the raw feed now. That is the part the old gatekeepers still hate. X is where the public watches events break in real time instead of waiting for the approved version. Facebook and the rest of the club never made that change. They still run the same closed shop. One man bought the platform and the filter came off. The others kept theirs. The difference is not subtle and it is not temporary.
Musk did not promise chaos. He promised the law, not the extra layer of private rules that had treated half the country like a distribution problem. The volume of political speech that now reaches ordinary users without prior clearance is larger than it was. That is measurable. The complaints from the people who used to set the rules are also measurable. They lost the ability to decide which stories existed. Americans who wanted an open square got one. The acquisition cost $44 billion. The result is that one major network no longer pretends the First Amendment stops at the login screen.
— Josiah Hale, WAA1776 #WeAreAmericans
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