When I lollygagged or dragged my feet as a small child, my mom used to say, "You have two choices: You can do it happily, or I can make you." Even as a preschooler, I understood that wasn't a choice at all, only a warning about how unpleasant things could get for me if I failed to comply.
Employees at Twitter—and Facebook—chose to censor, suppress, and undermine dissenting viewpoints happily. But they were always facing a false choice. The public has now had the chance to peek at thousands of communications between government officials of various stripes and employees of Twitter (the so-called Twitter Files), released by Elon Musk after his acquisition of the social media company. The messages reveal the ways the lines between public and private were consciously eroded during the COVID-19 era in an attempt to eradicate "misinformation," much of which turned out to be true and all of which was First Amendment–protected speech.