Social Media Censorship

Social media censorship describes the removal, demotion, or suppression of lawful speech on privately owned platforms that function as the main forum for public argument. Conservatives distinguish two things that critics collapse together: a company setting rules for its own property, which is ordinary, and a government leaning on that company to suppress speech it cannot reach directly, which is not.

The second practice has a name in American constitutional argument: jawboning. It is the conservative objection that carries legal weight, and it reached the Supreme Court twice in 2024 without producing a settled answer.

Key Takeaways

• The conservative complaint is aimed less at moderation itself than at the combination of concentrated platform power and informal government pressure.
• Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) and Mill’s On Liberty (1859) supply the two classic arguments against prior restraint, and conservatives use both while rejecting the libertine conclusions drawn from them.
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields platforms from liability for user content and for good-faith removal decisions, a combination that critics on both sides consider incoherent.
• Murthy v. Missouri (2024) turned on standing rather than the merits of federal pressure on platforms.
• Conservatives disagree among themselves: property-rights libertarians defend a platform’s right to exclude, while common-carrier advocates want the largest platforms treated as public conduits.

History And Context

The argument predates the internet by three centuries. Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643 restored pre-publication approval for printed works, and John Milton answered it in 1644 with Areopagitica, a speech addressed to Parliament arguing against licensing on the ground that truth needs no state protection in an open contest.¹ The licensing regime survived him and lapsed in England only in 1695, when Parliament declined to renew it.

John Stuart Mill restated the case in 1859 on different grounds. Where Milton argued theologically, Mill argued from fallibility: the suppressed opinion might be true, might contain part of the truth, and where it is wholly false its suppression leaves the correct opinion held as dead dogma rather than living conviction.² Conservatives take Mill’s second-order argument seriously while declining his first-order individualism. Scruton’s position, and Burke’s before it, was that free speech operates inside a settled moral and legal order rather than as a solvent of one.

The American statutory framework arrived with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Section 230 gave interactive computer services immunity from liability for content posted by users and, separately, protection for good-faith removal of objectionable material. The Supreme Court struck the Act’s indecency provisions in Reno v. ACLU in 1997 while leaving Section 230 intact.

Platform moderation grew from a small trust-and-safety function into an industrial operation after 2016, driven by concerns over foreign interference, then by the pandemic, then by the 2020 American election. Internal documents released in 2022 showed sustained contact between federal agencies and platform staff over specific accounts and claims. Litigation followed. In Murthy v. Missouri, decided 26 June 2024, the Court held 6-3 that the plaintiffs had not established standing to seek an injunction, leaving the underlying question of unconstitutional coercion unresolved.³ Days later, in Moody v. NetChoice, decided 1 July 2024, the Court vacated and remanded challenges to Florida and Texas laws restricting platform moderation, holding that the lower courts had not properly analysed the laws’ full range of applications.⁴ The European Union took a different route with the Digital Services Act, which imposes affirmative obligations on large platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives make four arguments.

The first is about laundering. A government that cannot ban a claim outright can achieve the same result by suggesting to a small number of firms, which hold licences, antitrust exposure, and regulatory dependencies, that certain material is a problem. No order is issued and no court reviews anything. Conservatives argue that the constitutional injury is identical whether the mechanism is a statute or a phone call, and that the informal route is worse because it leaves no record.

The second is about scale. Burke’s defence of established liberties assumed a plurality of institutions, none dominant. When a handful of firms control the distribution of political speech to billions, a private moderation decision has the practical reach of a public one. This is why some conservatives, breaking with libertarian orthodoxy, argue for common-carrier treatment of the largest platforms: the same reasoning that stopped a railway from refusing freight on political grounds.

The third is about asymmetry as evidence. Conservatives point to enforcement patterns rather than written rules, arguing that vague standards on misinformation and harm are applied unevenly by staff drawn from a narrow slice of opinion. The claim is empirical and contested, but the structural point stands regardless of who is disadvantaged: discretionary rules invite discretionary enforcement.

The fourth is about self-restraint. Conservatives do not hold that speech should be unlimited. Obscenity, defamation, incitement, and material harmful to children have always sat outside the protected core, and a conservative case for open platforms is not a case against any standards. The objection is to standards that are unwritten, unappealable, and shaped by an authority that denies it is exercising one.

Differing Positions

The strongest counterargument is that platforms hold editorial rights of their own. In Miami Herald v. Tornillo (1974) the Supreme Court struck a right-of-reply statute forcing a newspaper to print material it had not chosen. If curating a feed is editorial judgement, then a state law compelling a platform to carry speech is itself the censorship, and the conservative common-carrier position amounts to state control of a private publisher. Several members of the Court gestured at this reasoning in the 2024 NetChoice decisions.

A second position holds that moderation is a product decision, not a rights question. Users who dislike a platform’s rules can leave, and the emergence of competing services since 2022 suggests the market clears. On this view the conservative complaint is about audience size rather than liberty.

A third position accepts the free-speech framing and reaches the opposite conclusion: that coordinated falsehood at algorithmic scale is a harm the classical tradition never contemplated, and that Mill’s marketplace assumes a rough equality of reach that recommendation systems have destroyed.

References

1. John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing (London, 1644).
2. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (John W. Parker and Son, 1859), chapter 2.
3. Murthy v. Missouri, No. 23-411 (U.S. 26 June 2024).
4. Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, No. 22-277, and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton, No. 22-555 (U.S. 1 July 2024).