Power, free speech, and social media

Few topics in modern public life are more contested, or more important, than the relationship between social media platforms and free speech. The conversation has been running hot since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X. Several years on, the dust still hasn't fully settled, and the questions have only become more pointed. Who actually controls the public square in the digital age? Where should the line between free speech and harmful content sit? And what role do ordinary users play in shaping how all of this unfolds?

These aren't abstract questions for tech executives in Silicon Valley to argue about. They affect how every one of us communicates, conducts business, and participates in democracy.

Social media as the modern public square

A generation ago, most public discourse happened in physical spaces. Newspapers, broadcast networks, town halls, churches, pubs. The platforms that hosted public conversation were diverse, locally rooted, and largely beyond the control of any single owner.

That picture has changed dramatically. Today, a handful of platforms dominate where billions of people meet, debate, and form opinions. Each one is privately owned. Each one wields enormous influence over public discourse, and through that influence, shapes elections, markets, cultural trends, and political movements.

Three uncomfortable questions follow naturally.

• Who should genuinely control these spaces?
• How should free speech be balanced with content moderation?
• What responsibilities do platform owners have to the public, given the disproportionate influence they hold?

Anyone using social media seriously, whether as a business, a content creator, or just a citizen, has a stake in how those questions get answered.

The Musk experiment

When Musk took over Twitter, he described himself as a "free speech absolutist." His approach has involved several visible shifts.

• Significant reductions in proactive content moderation, with greater reliance on tools like Community Notes for crowd-sourced fact-checking.
• The reinstatement of previously banned accounts, including high-profile political figures.
• The replacement of the legacy verification system with a paid-subscription model.
• The discontinuation of specific policies on COVID-19 misinformation, election-outcome misinformation, and crisis misinformation.

Supporters argue these changes have rebalanced a platform that had become too restrictive. Critics worry that they've allowed misinformation, hate speech, and harassment to flourish in ways that previous moderation was holding in check.

The data, several years on, suggests the impact has been real. X has reportedly lost billions in advertising revenue since the takeover, partly because major brands feared being placed alongside content they didn't want their products associated with. Researchers have documented increases in hate speech and misinformation on the platform. Trust in X among advertisers has fallen significantly, with some surveys showing only a small minority now consider it brand-safe.

It's a fascinating natural experiment in what happens when a major platform deliberately rolls back content moderation. The results, depending on your starting position, are either a vindication of free speech or a cautionary tale about the limits of unmoderated public spaces. Probably both at once.

The free speech question, more carefully

Free speech is a cornerstone of democracy. It's worth defending. But it's not, and never has been, absolute, even in countries with the strongest free speech protections.

Most jurisdictions place limits on speech in specific areas like defamation, incitement to violence, fraud, false advertising, and threats. These limits exist because free speech, taken to an absolute extreme, can be used to harm other people in ways the law has long recognised as unacceptable.

Social media platforms face a version of the same problem at vastly greater scale. How do you create a space for genuine open dialogue without it becoming a place where misinformation, harassment, and abuse flourish? How do you protect speech without protecting the systematic targeting of vulnerable people? How do you uphold transparency without giving bad actors a roadmap to game your system?

There are no neat answers. Different platforms have made different trade-offs, and reasonable people genuinely disagree about which is best.

If you run any kind of online community yourself, even something small like a Facebook group or a comments section, the same trade-offs apply. Clear community guidelines that promote respectful discussion while setting boundaries on unacceptable behaviour are usually a healthier model than either total moderation or no moderation at all.

The hidden third party: advertisers

One of the most interesting features of the post-2022 period is how visible the role of advertisers has become.

Advertising is the primary revenue model of most major platforms. When advertisers pull spend, platforms feel it immediately. After Musk's takeover, many major brands paused or significantly reduced their advertising on X, citing concerns about the content their ads might be appearing alongside. The pressure was significant enough that Musk publicly criticised an industry coalition called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which X eventually sued. GARM disbanded in 2024.

The bigger lesson here is that economic power is at least as influential in shaping online spaces as regulatory power. Governments make rules. Advertisers make platforms viable. Both end up shaping what does and doesn't appear in your feed, in ways most users rarely think about.

It's worth being honest with yourself about how much your own information environment has been shaped by these commercial pressures.

What's coming next

Looking forward, three things are likely to keep reshaping this space.

• Decentralisation. Platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon are exploring decentralised models where no single owner controls the network. Whether these can scale to genuine mainstream usage remains to be seen, but the appetite for alternatives to centralised control is real.
• AI in content moderation. Generative AI is going to reshape both the volume of content being produced and the tools available to moderate it. The arms race between AI-generated misinformation and AI-powered detection will define the next phase of this debate.
• Digital literacy. Whatever the platforms do, the most important variable is still us. The ability to evaluate sources, spot manipulation, and resist algorithmic pull is the foundation everything else rests on.

Where this leaves us

The honest summary is that the social media landscape we're operating in is more contested, more powerful, and more consequential than at any point in its history. The decisions being made by a handful of platform owners, regulators, and advertisers are shaping what billions of people see, think, and believe.

In the end, though, the real power of these platforms still comes from us. The clicks, the posts, the attention, the energy we give them. Without users, the platforms have nothing.

That means our individual choices matter more than they sometimes feel. How we choose to engage online. What we choose to share. How we respond to others. How we model the kind of conversations we want our digital public square to have. All of it adds up.

We're not just consumers of the digital age. We're co-authors of it.

So as you scroll through your feed this week, what's one small change you could make to the way you engage online that, repeated by enough people, would actually start to shift the culture of these platforms?