Elon Musk Is Right That Twitter Should Follow the First Amendment

Elon Musk, in his effort to buy Twitter, signaled that under his ownership, the company would allow all speech that the First Amendment protects. “By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” he tweeted on April 26. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”

Many commentators were quick to point out that, as a private company, Twitter is not required to follow the First Amendment, which applies only to federal and state governments. And Musk has further been criticized by those who fear that harmonizing Twitter’s content rules with First Amendment doctrine would lead to an explosion of hate speech, misinformation, and incendiary statements, content that Twitter currently moderates.

This deregulatory approach would make Twitter an outlier among the social-media companies; at the moment, Twitter, like Facebook and Google, has chosen to adopt content rules stricter than First Amendment standards. Facebook, for example, prohibits “hate speech” or “attacks,” “violent or dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, disgust or dismissal, cursing and calls for exclusion or segregation.” By contrast, the although narrower than Facebook’s, still falls short of First Amendment standards.