When we framed the First Amendment, the press we imagined was numerous and partisan, entered through printers whose decisions were known to their towns. The press of your age is a small number of very large platforms, each making editorial choices at a scale no printer could have conceived, and each making them in private. This is not, of itself, a constitutional crisis, for the Amendment binds the government and not the publisher. But it poses a genuine question: under what authority does so much of public discourse pass through so few hands?

Let me be exact, for the exactness matters. A platform that moderates by its own lights, applying its own standard, is a private editorial enterprise. It is entitled to its judgment and answerable in the market when that judgment loses it readers. This is not censorship; it is publishing, which has always involved choosing. But a platform that removes speech at the direction or the sustained encouragement of government officials has, in that act, become an instrument of the state, however private it remains in name. There the Constitution applies with full force, for the government may not accomplish through pressure what it is forbidden to command.

The work of a free people, then, is neither to compel the platforms to carry every voice nor to permit officials to compel their silence. It is to insist upon transparency: on what ground was this speech removed, at whose request, under what standard. Sunlight does not resolve every hard case, but it furnishes the citizen the knowledge to judge, in the market and at the ballot.

Resist the two easy errors. That all private moderation is tyranny is one. That the platforms are public utilities to be run by federal direction is the other, and it would lodge in the government the very editorial power the Amendment was written to deny it.