1A might not be the end-all, be-all of freedom of speech, but what Musk is trying to push here is not anywhere close to freedom of speech. At all[0]. He wants t

1A might not be the end-all, be-all of freedom of speech, but what Musk is trying to push here is not anywhere close to freedom of speech. At all[0]. He wants to censor his critics, and has figured the easiest way to do so is to co-opt legitimate concerns about advertiser control over the Internet and use it as evidence of him being "censored". It's a very transparent attempt to do so, and Musk's commitment to freedom of speech is laughable, so we don't need to argue where the line between advertisers' freedom of association and Musk's freedom of speech actually lies. But if you do want to argue where that line should be, fine. I'll bite. Advertisers absolutely have too much control over speech online. 404 Media recently published an article about how brand safety filtering has more or less defunded a lot of news coverage relating to the loss of reproductive healthcare and women's rights in America. So I can empathize with what you're saying. However, I can't think of a coherent legal argument as to what the advertisers are doing wrong. In telecom law, we have the concept of common carrier regulation, which applies to middlemen that connect two parties together. e.g. your phone company cannot bill extra for the same phone call because it happens to be valuable to you[0]. We took a look at the balance of harms and decided that a phone network that cuts off businesses to extort money out of them is worse than the burden placed on phone networks to serve all customers, even the awful ones. How would this apply to a situation in which the edge of the network decides they don't want to associate with you? We're not talking about ad exchanges cutting off Twitter, mind. These are individual ad buyers all looking at Musk's behavior and deciding "we don't want to give this person money because it makes us look bad if we do that". Do we force ad buyers to blind-buy ad inventory to get around this? Can that even be done? How do they deal with the potential brand damage of being forced to give money to someone that people think is a censorious antisemite? Do companies just eat the loss of goodwill or do we force people to buy from companies they hate to "maximize free speech"? At some point we have to cut the chain of logic off, before the cure is worse than the disease. [0] More generally, my personal opinion is that free speech should have a self-defense clause: i.e. that it should not afford speech protections to acts that are contrary to freedom of speech. I think advocating Nazi ideology would count as such an act; certainly most of not all of their ideology is a blatant middle finger to the 1st Amendment. Why protect that which wants desperately to kill you?