Days after Mark Zuckerberg planted his flag in favor of free speech by announcing that Facebook wouldn't censor political advertising, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, apparently bowing to pressure from his platform's largely liberal user base, announced a contrary policy: Twitter will no longer accept any political ads. For Zuckerberg, the price of good speech is that some bad speech gets through; for Dorsey, fear of bad speech means that all manner of good speech must now be rejected.
As a private company, Twitter has a right to make this decision; it is not violating the First Amendment. Dorsey's tweets explaining the change, however, suggest considerable confusion. “This isn't about free expression. This is about paying for reach,” explained Dorsey. But of course it's about free expression. Speech—particularly speech about elections—is worth little without an audience. In modern society, it takes money to “reach” most audiences. That's why businesses advertise, governments spend millions on public education programs, and people spend money to travel to mass rallies, buy bumper stickers, and engage in other forms of political communication. It's an elementary principle of First Amendment law that you can't limit spending in order to limit the reach of speech. You can't prevent Planned Parenthood, for example, from speaking about abortion rights, and you can't end-run the First Amendment by prohibiting them from spending money to advocate for that same cause.
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