Capitalist Havens of Free Speech

Even before Twitter banned Donald Trump and Amazon stopped hosting the social media site Parler on its web services, free-speech controversies had been regularly erupting at newspapers, magazines, websites, and book publishers. Notable recent cases involved high-profile journalists decamping from their established media homes to independent platforms where they could express themselves freely. The departures, under pressure, of Matt Yglesias last November from the website Vox, which he cofounded, and Andrew Sullivan in July from New York, where he was one of the magazine’s most popular writers, made them fellow travelers with a more conservative journalist, Bari Weiss, who left the New York Times last summer, saying, “If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome.”

Many on the right have seen these departures as examples of a troubling clampdown on free speech, but some progressives dismissed the moves as opportunistic; Sullivan and others have won large readerships at their new homes, they noted. After political scientist Yascha Mounk tweeted support for Yglesias’s move, New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac countered that Mounk “conveniently ignores the fact that people w/large followings are making bank by jumping ship.”

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