Congratulations to Elon Musk. He’s managed to get both the left and right furious with him over the course of a single week. He took a victory lap himself over this on Thursday, tweeting, “Being attacked by both right & left simultaneously is a good sign.”

Ironically, left, right, and Elon Musk himself are wrong about content moderation on Twitter being “a free speech issue.” Twitter is and always has been private property, even when it was publicly traded. It is not “the new public square.” This is commie talk.

Now, many would argue that the people previously running Twitter were communists themselves. There is good evidence this is true, including the admission by one of Twitter’s employees to a Project Veritas undercover journalist that the Twitter workforce is “commie as f—.” But the personal views of the employees, executive or otherwise, is not at issue. The company was and is privately owned by its shareholders.

That the platform is widely popular has given rise to the notion, especially among those aggrieved by being censored or banned, that one has a right to be on the platform and express one’s views, based on a right to free speech. Musk says he bought the platform to protect free speech on this supposedly “public forum.”

What do you expect from a self-described socialist?

What is a Twitter account?

Let’s take a moment to consider what is a Twitter account. A Twitter account is a bundle of code, residing on a physical server, created and maintained by Twitter employees. It interacts with various applications that combine to make up the Twitter platform, all also created and maintained by Twitter employees or vendors.

In other words, the Twitter platform, each individual Twitter account, and all the other software and hardware that combine to make Twitter run are the products of the labor of other people. Ultimately, all this labor is paid for by private owners just like the labor in a clothing factory or a supermarket. And no one can have a “right” to the labor of other people.

By way of preemption, please spare me the “but it uses tax funded infrastructure to operate!” I shouldn’t have to point out that if one applies that standard across the board to all businesses the commies win. I’m all for abolishing publicly funded infrastructure and making every business provide their own, but until that happens, I want as much private property and capitalism as possible.

Every argument against government healthcare or the welfare state in general rests upon the principle that no person can have a right to the labor of another. There is no ambiguity here. You don’t have a right to a Twitter account. Period.

Corporatism vs. Captialism

When I make this argument, I’m often told by midwits I don’t understand the difference between corporatism and capitalism. The thrust of this argument is that the existence of the regulatory state, particularly the FCC and other federal agencies, create a government-controlled market that gives advantages to preferred corporations over others. I am very aware of this argument and agree wholeheartedly. I’ve written extensively about the damage FDR’s New Deal continues to do to the American business environment.

The problem is that argument doesn’t apply to this situation. Nothing stopped me from joining MeWe, Parler, Gab, Gettr, or even former President Trump’s own platform, Truth Social. If the 74 million people who voted for Trump did likewise, then every one of those platforms would have more U.S. users than Twitter, which has 70 million.

Instead, these same people cry out for the government to regulate Twitter like a public utility – most of which are terrible precisely because they’re regulated like public utilities – rather than simply availing themselves of the costless opportunity to create accounts on competing platforms.

They also have the prerogative of deleting their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform whose policies offend them. If they could all coordinate their activities to vote for Donald Trump on the same day, they could certainly coordinate their activities to delete their Facebook accounts on the same day. This would deal a devastating blow to the platform without an iota of government intervention, which would do no good and much harm anyway.

The Public Accommodation Concept

 The idea that private companies which sell products to the public or “accommodate” the public on their premises are subject to government regulation of their policies has its roots, at least in this country, in the civil rights movement of the mid-20^th century. And as almost everyone conveniently forgets, that civil rights movement was dominated by socialists and communists.

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Tom