What’s the state of online free speech after Twitter’s decision to sell itself to billionaire Elon Musk, who has promised to restore stronger free speech norms on the platform? Many centrist commentators seem alarmed at the thought that ordinary, working-class people will be too free to express themselves as they please and access a broad range of points of view so they can make up their own minds about what’s right and what’s wrong.

I have the opposite concerns. I worry that we won’t be able to count on Musk to stick to his stated principles when they come into conflict with his profits. More importantly, it’s absurd that we live in the kind of capitalist hellscape where the only hope for reasonable norms protecting free speech online is that we get lucky and the right kind of billionaire purchases our digital public square. It’s as if we lived in a kind of libertarian dystopia where every inch of every city was private property, and we could only hold protest marches on sidewalks that happened to have been bought by billionaires who were personally friendly to free speech.