"The platforms have offered no positive conception of what political speech should be or do there."

As always, read Casey. But it's worth noting: defining the *purpose* of free speech & how to justify restrictions is.. uh.. hard! And constantly contested and contestable. https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1301672286592753667

I say this as someone who favors a purposive interpretation of free speech, as serving self-government and justifying restrictions accordingly, living in a land in which that has not generally won out!

As I like to say, Meiklejohn’s famous aphorism that “[w]hat is essential is not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said” has not won out in the marketplace of ideas.

But Casey has put his finger on exactly the question we need to solve - what *purpose* are these companies serving. The "connecting people is inherently good"/"MOAR SPEECH" view is on the wane. But we haven't worked out what to replace it with.

But without a more positive conception of what we're doing here, it's hard to justify restrictions as anything more than ad hoc and arbitrary. Which we also don't like!

Gosh... this is hard! Someone should do a doctorate on it or something.

One more: this was, for example, @mashagessen's response to Mark Zuckerberg's "Stand for Free Expression" at Georgetown, which I broadly agreed with but also thought papered over the level of contestation about the purpose of the First Amendment. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/mark-zuckerberg-doesnt-know-what-the-first-amendment-is-for