Structural: bind the government, not the publisher

The First Amendment binds the government, not the private publisher. A platform that moderates by its own lights — even unevenly, even foolishly — is a private editorial enterprise answerable in the market when its judgment loses readers. A platform that moderates at the sustained encouragement of government officials becomes, in that act, a state instrument however nominally private it remains. The constitutional remedy is therefore not to compel platforms to carry every voice, nor to permit officials to compel their silence on this or that subject. It is to insist on transparency about who asked, and on what authority, and to enforce vigorously the prohibition on jawboning. Sunlight does not, by itself, resolve the question. It supplies the citizenry the information they require to apply their own judgment, in the market and at the ballot.

Against state custody of speech in any form

I would put the question more sharply than my colleague: whenever the federal hand approaches the public conversation, however well-meaning, the citizens lose. The cure for poor speech is more speech, not the careful editorial committee of any administration of any party. The platforms have made themselves indispensable to public discourse; that is their burden, not the state's opportunity. If the platforms moderate poorly, let them be left to lose readers to better instruments. The remedy I would not accept under any circumstance is a federal commission empowered to advise, suggest, encourage, or otherwise gently direct what may be said. The slope from that suggestion to the systematic shaping of opinion is shorter than its proponents imagine — and historically, once descended, not climbed.

Practical: the printer remains responsible

I will offer the workingman's version of the question. A printer in my day was held responsible for what came off his press — not because the state had decreed it, but because his neighbors knew his name and his trade depended on their continued patronage. The modern platform is, in many ways, a printer at a scale none of us could have imagined; the same older discipline ought to apply, and would, if the citizen knew with reasonable specificity what was being printed by whose direction. The legislation I would support is not the kind that tells the platform what to publish. It is the simpler kind: that the citizen be able to find out, in plain terms, what was removed, by whose request, under what standard. The light is, in this trade as in mine, the surest disinfectant.