When you hear increasing right-wing (I refuse to say "conservative") calls for government oversight of social media speech policies, it's vitally important to understand some of the career/economic context. Many of the people most alarmed made a gamble. /1

They invested enormous time, energy, and effort into a platform they didn't create, don't control, and use for free. They've built impressive followings here, sometimes through edge-lord behavior, skating at the outer margins of Twitter's policies. /2

As progressive speech values shift (after all, this is a site created by progressives and run by progressives) some of that on-the-line tweeting is going to cross newly-created lines, thus jeopardizing all that effort and risking extinguishing their primary public presence. /3

That's why the debate often takes on a slightly-crazed tone. It's not merely an abstract debate over constitutional principles and corporate values. Lots of folks went all-in on creating an edgy presence on arguably the most progressive social media site. /4

They don't want to start over on Facebook. They don't want to flee to Gab. Nor do they want to start from scratch on TikTok ("Chuck Todd won't know I destroyed him!") or Snapchat or YouTube or Reddit. And they're certainly not content to "only" write on the platforms they own. /5

So here we are, in the grips of an incredibly self-interested effort to pull more and more of the government into social media regulation, even to the point of potentially overriding long-cherished First Amendment freedoms. It's important to understand one reason why. /end