The remedy for the abuses of liberty has, by long experience, been the cultivation of more liberty — not its abridgment. That maxim has not changed because the printing press has been replaced by the platform; it has merely been strained by the new scale of the press.

When we drafted the First Amendment, the imagined press was numerous, partisan, and entered through proprietors whose decisions were known to their towns. The modern press is, by contrast, a small number of very large platforms, each of which makes editorial decisions at a scale no eighteenth-century printer could have imagined, and each of which makes those decisions in private. That is not, by itself, a constitutional crisis — the First Amendment binds the government, not the publisher — but it does pose a constitutional question of a different kind: under what authority does so much of public discourse pass through so few hands?

The question is not whether platforms should moderate. They must; the alternative is unreadable. The question is who decides, by what standard, and answerable to whom. A platform that moderates by its own lights, applying its own standard, is a private editorial enterprise — entitled to its judgment, and answerable in the market when its judgment loses readers. A platform that moderates at the direction or sustained encouragement of government officials is, in that act, a state instrument, however nominally private it remains. The Constitution applies in the latter case; it does not in the former.

The work of legislation here is therefore neither to compel platforms to carry every voice nor to permit officials to compel their silence on this or that subject. The work is to insist on transparency: on what grounds was a piece of speech removed; by whose request; under what standard. Sunlight does not, by itself, resolve the question. It does, however, supply the citizenry with the information they require to apply their own judgment, in the market and at the ballot.

We should resist two simple answers. The first — that any private moderation is censorship — collapses the public/private distinction the Constitution requires. The second — that platforms are public utilities to be operated under detailed federal direction — concentrates in the federal hand exactly the editorial power the First Amendment was meant to deny it.

Between those errors lies the harder work: clear rules of transparency, vigorous enforcement of the rule against jawboning, and a citizenry sufficiently educated to value the structure of speech over the satisfaction of any particular faction's preferred silence.