Now that Elon Musk’s long-anticipated takeover of Twitter has finally gone through, many liberals are angry for all the wrong reasons. They seem to be worried that Musk will allow too much free speech on the platform and that this will enable bigotry and “misinformation.”

As a democratic socialist, I reject that view root and branch. Empowering ordinary people to run society in their own interests is the whole point of the socialist project — and that’s flatly incompatible with the technocratic liberal view that ordinary people can’t be trusted to decide for themselves what to believe.

And socialists obviously reject the view that free speech only applies to governments and that private companies should be able to do whatever they want. If I didn’t think private regimes of power could be dangerous, I wouldn’t be a socialist in the first place.