Conservatives posturing about private companies choosing which users will be allowed to post content on the platforms they own are confusing three things, and in confusing them, deliberately or mistakenly, they are merely posturing rather than engaging in genuine reform.

The first thing is Free Speech as a legal concept, which has specific limits and specific targets: government not regulating (punishing) people for speaking to each other, especially about government itself.

The second is Free Speech as a philosophical concept, which has no specific limits or targets, and is a general resistance to anyone denying anyone else an ability to say anything they want.

The third is Free Speech as a commercial concept, which has limits according to the private business that owns the space in which the speech occurs, and can be used to suppress voices within those private spaces.

The PHILOSOPHICAL concept is the root of the conservative posturing, and their target is the COMMERCIAL concept insofar as they confuse that one with the CONSTITUTIONAL concept. But neither the constitutional nor commercial ones are the same sort of thing. So, posturing.

HOWEVER, as private businesses own more and more public goods, have more and more influence in public spheres (including government, shared spheres), the more the COMMERCIAL concept approaches requiring the same limits as the CONSTITUTIONAL one.

And this is where conservatives are getting things backward: They want to apply a PHILOSOPHICAL notion of free speech to private businesses, when what they should beware is private businesses becoming so powerful there are no public spaces, only private ones.

There is no reason to apply a PHILOSPOHICAL concept of free speech to private businesses, nor a CONSTITUTIONAL one. But there is a reason to beware private businesses gaining so much power there is no room for a public space.

And that should be our common goal: private companies that are legally only responsible for shareholder returns cannot be allowed to own so much that there is no public space left. It's about corporate growth, not commercial limits on who gets an account and who doesn't.

Trying to require private businesses to behave like the government is putting the cart before the horse; we should be preventing private businesses from BECOMING government. Break them up, limit their growth, tax their outsized profits, grow the public space.

The end.