Taibbi’s story was drawn from “thousands” of internal company documents provided to him by Elon Musk, and was perhaps the first piece of journalism that came with its own promotion campaign from the world’s richest man.

This past weekend, the writer Matt Taibbi released what he called “THE TWITTER FILES,” a somewhat puzzling series of tweets fashioned in the shape of a work of investigative journalism. Is Instagram hiding their posts? Have they been “shadow-banned” on Twitter? Is there a council of élites who determine which thoughts are acceptable and which ones are not? One reason that this conversation feels both stunted and endless is that the same people who feel the deepest paranoia that their speech is being impinged upon don’t exactly know how. But, unfortunately for everyone who would rather mute the words “First Amendment” from their lives than read another opinion column about free speech, a great number of Americans seem to believe that we have entered an era of unprecedented censoriousness. These days, every debate about free speech and social media in America feels tendentious and dumb.

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