If a government wants to create a panopticon thought police state, they don’t even have to do it themselves. They can simply get your corporate overlords to threaten you with fines, social credit scores, or banishment for wrongthink. This is one aspect of 1984 that Orwell got wrong. It isn’t just Big Brother who’s watching. It’s all his Little Nephews, too.

Your right to free speech doesn’t apply when that speech is transmitted via privately-run communication networks. There, the normal rules don’t exist. One mistake, and you can lose money, have your voice temporarily silenced, or your account terminated. You can’t even object to this, because you didn’t bother to read and just scrolled down and clicked “I agree” to the thousands of words in the Terms of Service when you signed up, and then did it again every time they changed the terms.

There will be lots of people who cheer on a company (working on behalf of the state) that punishes its customers for violating their arbitrary rules, because censorship works fine when you’re on the side of the censors.

But one day it will be their turn.