The moderation decisions that are made by Twitter and Facebook and National Review and Johnny’s Bar and Emily’s Cat Blog may, indeed, be stupid. But they are those sites’ bad decisions, not the U.S. government’s. “Deputize,” “outsource,” “induce” — these words all mean something concrete, and that something is not “to act according to one’s own ideological star.” Donald Trump, you will likely recall, was expelled from both Twitter and Facebook while he was the president of the United States. It would be an extremely strange form of deputization that led to that outcome, n’est-ce pas?

Hochman insists that abolishing or reforming Section 230 would not be “inconsistent with the principle of limited government.” And, in a narrow sense, that is true. The antitrust issues and questions of common-carrier status that the big social-media companies raise, for instance, should be treated seriously — and separately — from the question of liability. And yet, hovering underneath Hochman’s essay there lies an extraordinarily statist implication that deserves to be dismissed with prejudice: The notion that if a government seeks in any way to codify or ease the rights and liabilities of definitionally private actors, that government becomes complicit in how those rights are subsequently used. Given their totalizing worldview, it would make sense for progressives to cast a lack of government action as de facto “deputization.” To a conservative however, the idea should be anathema.